The curator of "Playback," the multi-disciplinary artist's exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, shares an exclusive excerpt from the exhibition catalog.
From her earliest experiments, Steina has consistently made it her mission to compose moving images that exceed human vision. Her own early encounter with video was transformative: “It was like falling in love,” she has said. “What a rush!” And when she and her late partner, Woody Vasulka, turned the camera back on its own monitor and saw feedback, they were hooked: “It was the energy. It was very cosmic.”
The cosmic energy was video’s signal: electronic waveforms that could generate images free of representation, narrative, and human subjectivity. The signal could produce endlessly morphing light and sound; audio could be translated into video; video images could buzz and sing; open-reel tape ribbons could be plucked or bowed like violin strings to create distortions. Coming from the world of music as a classically trained violinist, Steina brought a sensibility of performance to her compositions, treating video equipment as instruments for composing and improvising image and sound in real time.
Steina: Playback, the retrospective accompanying this publication, emerged from the observation that Steina’s work did not fit into many of the prominent narratives around video art’s history. This was, in part, because many of these histories center on early video art’s response to politics, social injustice, or television culture. The Icelandic-born artist, an outsider to US politics and culture, instead took up human-centered perception as a site of confrontation.
This publication offers the most comprehensive overview of Steina’s work and practice to date. Themes of System Performance, Tools, Signals, Machine Vision, and Ecology organize sections of related plates, accompanied by robust introductory texts authored by Zach Ngin that narrate Steina’s history and evolution as a maker. “An Experiment in Real Time” synthesizes Steina’s dialogue with the curatorial team (Natalie Bell, Helga Christoffersen, and Ngin), and in the book’s roundtable conversation, scholars and curators Rebecca Cleman, Lenka Dolanová, Larisa Dryansky, Rudolf Frieling, Chris Hill, Tina Rivers Ryan, and Kristín Scheving reflect on Steina and Woody’s shared legacy, acknowledging their lifelong collaboration in fostering networks of creative engineers and pioneering modes of open-source knowledge-sharing. Together, they contextualize the Vasulkas’ practice and work over the decades—from challenges faced by early “video people” to their anti-institutional ethos as artists.
Opening up “The Politics of Steina’s Computational Play,” art historian Gloria Sutton thoughtfully analyzes the politics of Steina’s “roguish” approach to new media and computation and her “seeming insistence on remaining ‘out of sync’” with, among many other things, the dominant drive toward technological optimization. Joey Heinen’s essay, “Divining Intervention: Steina’s Pursuit of the Signal,” serves as a robust introduction to the Vasulkas’ tools and their “electronic hooliganism” from 1970 to the 2000s, chronicling the processing tools that allowed them to “embody” or “manifest” the signal, and how signals could encode and decode. Spatiality is the lead subject in Ina Blom’s insightful estimate of Steina’s contributions to video. In “Video Space: Steina’s Version,” Blom invites us to consider “electronic space” by juxtaposing space exploration alongside Steina’s “intensive effort to construct three-dimensionality in video space.”
The Vasulkas’ archives, distributed across several physical sites and consolidated, in part, at vasulka.org, have proven vital throughout the research for this book and exhibition. In its front and back pages, you will find a sampling of the twenty thousand or so pages they cataloged over decades. Loosely strewn on the spread, some documents are almost short stories in themselves, while others are breadcrumbs that invite the reader (or future art historian) to go deeper.
As a younger generation of artists considers modes of art making that resist easy commodification or question the place of technology and the human in relation to larger ecological and planetary concerns, Steina’s work could not be timelier. Her enduring commitment to curiosity and play, and her desire to use video to show us what the human eye cannot see, tune into the energies inherent to both video and the natural phenomena around us. Steina’s vision of an electronic sublime remains groundbreaking, contemporary, and prescient.
