STEINA
FOYER
BAD
Steina
1979
Videó, hljóð
Video, sound
2’00”
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
BAD is the mnemonic command for the B-Address register of our Buffer
Oriented Digital Device. There are several functions in this register,
namely: Up/Down, Left/Right, X and Y maps, and 9 variations on
resolution, here manifested as stretching or squeezing of the image. The
tape starts with the register at Zero and adds One at a pre-programmed
speed. For sound, the most active bits are selected, translated through a
digital/analog converter to voltage controlled oscillators. Then blue is
added on the darkest grey (black) and red on a middle grey, leaving the
remaining image Black/White. (Steina)
In BAD, (Steina ́s) sound/image experiments are extended to a digital
context. In this work, Steina weaves a rhythmic sound and image to
examine the up/down, right/left movement, and squeezing/stretching of
the image in digital technology, using her face as the image material.
http://www.vasulka.org/archive/Vasulkas3/Video/TapeDescriptions/TapeDescriptions.pdf
BAD
Stills no. 1 — 8
Steina
2020
Litaprentun á pappír
Pigment print on paper
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
Gallery 1
Orbital Obsessions
Steina & Woody Vasulka
1975–77; revised 1988
Videó, hljóð
Video, sound
24’25”
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Courtesy of Steina and BERG Contemporary
“Orbital Obsessions” is a 23:23 minutes compilation by Steina from 1977 of the “Machine Vision” project of installations and videotapes that used mechanized modes of camera control to address human perception. The work combines segments from several tapes that Steina produced in the Vasulkas’ studio in Buffalo, New York, from 1975 to 1977, including excerpts from”Signifying Nothing” (1975), “Sound and Fury” (1975), “Switch! Monitor!Drift!” (1976) and “Snowed Tapes” (1977). “Orbital Obsessions” superimposes and alters these different image sources through processing, keying, and sequencing devices that simultaneously record and play the effects as they occur. In these works Steina focuses on time, space, and movement, and the means which the mechanical can inform and engage with electronic media. The works were also created during the mid seventies, a time that Steina was deeply involved in experimentation and during which time process was frequently considered equally important to produce.
https://www.li-ma.nl/lima/catalogue/art/steina/orbital-obsessions/18287
Bókfell
Pergament
Steina
2014
Videó, hljóð
Video, sound
12’31”
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
In February 2014 Steina spent about a month in Iceland working on a concept for an electronic piece in collaboration with the National Gallery of Iceland and the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. She was given access to Old Icelandic manuscripts in the Institute’s collection, and thus an entirely new side of her work is seen: the sagas, priceless treasures of Iceland’s cultural heritage, are presented in an innovative setting in the form of an electronic work of art. Steina selected a number of manuscripts for her work, and inventively spliced them together so that they flow onwards, twisting and turning and swelling like seaweed caught up in an ocean current. For the first time, literary art and ink-drawing become a theme for Steina, as blood-red capital letters and moth-eaten illuminations float by on a slow, constantly-flowing stream. Pergament marks an important departure in Steina’s art, as hitherto she has focussed on Icelandic nature and the nature of society – for instance in the Japanese works which went to form Tokyo Four (1991), in which she analysed the culture in the Land of the Rising Sun in a quite an importunate manner, accompanied by a rhythm reminiscent of the movements of a piece of chamber music. It has often been said of Steina’s work that music is never far away; but in Pergament she departs from that rule, and music gives way to the graphic impact of the manuscripts. There is, however, much in the flow of manuscript images that is reminiscent of music – recalling musical notation or, perhaps even more strongly, the tapered dynamic signs for crescendo and diminuendo leading left to right across the page. It is as if an epic tale is being told, with its ups and downs – like the history of a nation in book form, that spans both thrilling peaks and uneventful interludes. The texture of the manuscripts and their writing resembles skin which has been wounded or scorched, rent with innumerable bleeding wounds. Steina succeeds in bringing out what lies beneath – strange and incomprehensible destinies, where the bad guy is often the winner. Like the matter-of-fact voice in which the Icelandic sagas are recounted, Pergament sheds light on the tragedies behind this great literature. There is no shouting or screaming, no weeping or wailing: the story is told in an even, steady tone.
Steina var með hugann við þetta ljóð þegar að hún gerði Bókfell.
Listen to the poem that inspired Steina in the making of Pergament
Í Árnasafni
In Árni Museum
Jón Helgason
https://listasafnarnesinga.is/hveragerdi/syningar/jon-helgason-i-arnasafni/?fb-edit=1
Samhliða brautir
Parallel Trajectories
Steina
2022
Videó, hljóð
Video, sound
20’36”
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
Parallel Trajectories is a reflection on the Vasulkas lives and work offering an episodic summary of the ways in which Steina and Woody have developed their double lane approach to electronic media.
While Woody concentrated on the gear proper of the transformative properties of the computer, the synthesizer, and the various interface tools chasing the core of the electronic image, Steina focuses on the camera and its optical and performative possibilities bringing the video into a musical choreography.
Steina sets the stage with a kaleidoscopic image processing display against a background of a sonic respiratory resonance that transforms into the aural electronic oscillation of Woody’s circuit board scans in different stages of decay indicative of hidden machine operations.
Woody’s mechanical ingenuity and Steina’s responsiveness and spontaneity intertwine during the animation of the Maiden from the Brotherhood series via Violin Power as if the robot is conducting the soloist and vice versa.
What begins in Steina’s composition as an encounter, an interaction between human and machine with Woody characterizing an ever present predicament in an ominous sacrificial tone, ends in an ephemeral display of the symbiosis between the fluttering chatter of sound woven with its fluid rippling image.
SINGLE CHANNEL WORKS
Lilith, 1987
(with Doris Cross)
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
Video (color, sound); 9:12 min.
In Lilith, Steina adds an elusive narrative element to her landscapes, modifying and manipulating the face of painter, Doris Cross in an eerie reference to female icons (Lilith, a biblical figure (in some texts she was the first wife of Adam) who represents a witch or a woman with mystical powers). Cross ́ face is submerged within the landscape, and with her haunting, slowed speech she appears to reach out from the earth in a primordial gesture. (Maria Sturken)
The tape Lilith has been compared to figurines of the protocinematic culture, but looked at closely, we recognise that access to the mind field may also be attained though topological analysis of the human face. (Liz Rymland)
Steina ́s highly structured work is also playful and open-ended evidencing a synthesis of spontaneity and control – a fusion of the cerebral and the sensual – in her investigations of space, movement, and point of view.
http://www.vasulka.org/archive/Vasulkas3/Video/TapeDescriptions/TapeDescriptions.pdf
Pyroglyphs, 1995
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
Video (color, sound); 27:20 min.
A Video Environment by Steina In Collaboration with Tom Joyce The initial
inspiration for Pyroglyphs was the ancient art of blacksmithing but it soon became
a musical treatise . . . In Steina’s words: “In 1994 I spent long hours with blacksmith
Tom Joyce, videotaping the process of building an iron gate. I found iron gates a
little too concrete, so I closed in on the intense and violent nature of materials
being manipulated by torches, files, and anvils—the rapid flicker of flames . . . Tom
and I share a fascination with fire — as a phenomenon and as a medium of
transmutation.”
Steina videotaped, mostly in closeup, the activities of blacksmithing (hammering,
filing, welding, manipulating fire), the phenomenology of fire (flames, sparks,
combustions, glowing metals), and various improvised scenes — a vise crushing
timber, a stack of books burning, paper and wood being scorched.
Editing this material into three complementary image tracks was relatively easy (the
visuals were similar or dissimilar in compatible ways) but the sounds of those
images were often too similar or too strident, competing for attention. So the
sounds determined the editing. Steina processed them through digital devices like
harmonizers, which couldn’t turn the random noises into harmonics but produced
interesting sounds anyway; pitch shifters that move a sound to intervals
immediately above or below; and reverb circuits to create echo effects. The sounds
and rhythms are rendered allegro con brio, pianoforte, or pianissimo: there is a lot of
percussive hammering, say, then all is quiet and we hear only crackling flame or the
hollow whisper of the blowtorch . . .
PYROGLYPHS is a spectacular meditation on fire. Steina has created a sublime
landscape illumined by the many-hued glow of fevered metals and showers of
sparkling scintilla. She makes us feel the hypnotic pull of lambent flames even as
our breath is caught by the pre-emptive ignition of the torch, our hearts quickened
by the violence of the forge.
Gene Youngblood
http://www.li-ma.nl/lima/catalogue/art/steina/pyroglyphs/2841
Summer Salt, 1982
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
Video (color, sound); 18:48 min.
(subtitles: Sky High, Low Ride, Somersault, Rest, Photographic Memory)
Summer salt is a playful exploration into the phenomenology of the electronic image, one that does not so much examine the contrast of digital and analog, but the basic positions and movements of the video camera. Here, Steina uses Machine Vision to view the landscape from angles unavailable to the human eye: In Sky High, she holds the camera with a mirrored lens attachment on the roof of her car for a sky-saturated view; in Low Ride, she straps it to the front bumper to give a tactile, low angle view in which the desert floor seems to invade the television screen. In Somersault, she performs gymnastics with the camera (with a mirrored lens attachment that gives a fisheye lens effect) in a humorous almost slapstick exercise on the mobility of the video camera… decentering the viewer’s sense of gravity and inserting her body as an active force within the frame. By transforming the rectangular video frame into a circle. Steina blocks our reflex to read the camera image as a window on the world. (Marita Sturken)
Photographic Memory refers to the ability certain individuals possess to superimpose a visual memory onto their current experience, as when on a hot summer night a branch might be wrapped in snow by the mind’s eye. The two video images in this tape were taken only eight hours apart in the volatile weather of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. (MaLin Wilson)
Selected Treecuts, 1980
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
Video (color, sound); 8:11 min.
Selected Treecuts is a formal examination of the distinction between camera-generated and digital images, and a layered juxtaposition of contrasting representations of reality . The methodology of the tape is simple : a zoom lens moves slowly in and out on a group of trees, alternating between digitized and cameragenerated, “real” images.
The movement in the tape is produced by the automated zoom lens and rotating prism ; the images switch rhythmically between camera images and digital images held briefly in computer memory . The contrast between the “real” camera images of trees and the frozen, digital computer images forms an essay in motion and stillness, the organic and the synthetic, tracing a trajectory from the photographic to the electronic.
Urban Episodes, 1980
Video (color, sound); 8:50 min.
Violin Power, 1969-1978
Courtesy of the artist, Thoma Foundation and BERG Contemporary.
Video (b&w, sound); 10:04 min.
Steina terms this procedural work “a demo tape on how to play video on the violin.” Her background as a violinist and her evolution from musician to visual artist is referenced through an analogy of video camera to musical instrument. Steina is first seen in footage from 1969 playing the violin and then later singing toThe Beatles’ Let It Be. As succeeding segments trace a chronological progression, Steina layers imagery and time. The violin itself ultimately becomes an image generating tool, as she connects it to imaging devices, creating abstract visual transpositions of sound and vibrations. This unconventional self-portrait is a study of the relationship of music to electronic image.
Voice Windows (with Joan La Barbara), 1986
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
Video (color, stereo sound); 8:11 min.
“Voice Windows”, a work for interactive voice and video, is the result of a collaboration between Steina (who was originally a violinist) and the composer and media artist Joan La Barbara who frequently experiments with vocal techniques. Steina and Woody Vasulka have developed an interactive system where the sound patterns created by La Barbara’s voice can be visualized as video images so that sound and image are completely integrated. Hence the specific sounds of La Barbara’s voice influence the forms and patterns that appear on screen. Her experimental singing forms ‘windows’ or grids that open out onto Steina’s images of moving landscapes. In “Voice Windows” image and sound combine into an interactive and spatial unity.
https://www.li-ma.nl/lima/catalogue/art/steina/voice-windows/138
Warp, 2000
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Courtesy of the artist and BERG Contemporary
Video (color, sound); 4:30 min.
“Warp” was created using the Imagine/ine software, developed in 1997 by Tom Demeyer at STEIM, Amsterdam. This software was developed in close collaboration with Steina herself. At the time of it’s creation Image/ine was the first piece of software which allowed users to manipulate uncompressed video in real time on consumer grade computers.
“Warp” makes use of two features of the Image/ine software: the first feature – ‘warp’ – is a time delay mode, which scans one line at the time, leaving the rest of the image motionless. With the second feature – ‘slit scan’ – a point or line in a continuously moving image is captured and streamed forward. The capturing line can be at the sides, middle, top or bottom as seen in the video.
Steina’s image in “Warp” mrphs continuously, through both the software effects and her natural movements. The fluctuating image reveals multiperspectival movements and a trail of sculptural forms of movement are left behind in the video.
Through spatial immersion in “Warp”, one becomes aware of the interactions between body-and-machine and machine-and-machine and that is not an activity with external features but an internal process.
https://www.li-ma.nl/lima/catalogue/art/steina/warp/18267#
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