Woody Vasulka, an experimental video artist who found inspiration in sources as diverse as René Magritte, nuclear war and technology, and who was a founder of the Kitchen, the landmark avant-garde performance space in Manhattan, died on Dec. 20 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Steinunn (Bjarnadottir) Vasulka, known as Steina, who was an occasional collaborator on Mr. Vasulka’s projects. She said she did not know the cause.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Vasulka was one of a group of avant-garde artists who saw video as an emerging medium as compelling as film, sculpture and painting.

“Video is an art unto itself, with its own reality, visual language and its own conception of time and space,” he told The New York Times in 1972 when he organized a video festival of mostly abstract works at the Kitchen, which he and his wife had opened a year earlier in SoHo. The low cost of videotape, he added, encouraged experimentation.