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steina vasulka - orka

contents:   essay  |  artist's bio  |  artist's statement

Steina and her husband and collaborator, Woody Vasulka, are two key artists in the development of video technology and its use in the creation of moving image artworks. In her earliest works, Steina, a classically trained violinist who played with the Iceland National Orchestra, synthesised an intuitive, atmospheric musical approach to video with a desire to test and expand the limits of the medium. With Woody, she was responsible for some key developments in electronic imaging technologies, and in their early video experiments in the renowned New York artists' venue, The Kitchen, they created spatial and interactive audio and video installations such as Machine Vision (1975) and All Vision (1975) that can be considered key works in contemporary art.

Orka was first exhibited in the Icelandic pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. With Orka, Steina seeks to create an audiovisual environment in which viewers are able to suspend themselves as part of the same creative trance within which she creates her work. Her desire is to offer a gift to the viewer - to use video technology to show a world, both sensory and emotional, that the viewer may not have experienced. This is only made possible through her subtle use of video effects to subvert the laws of nature and to show the world as she feels it rather than sees it.

The title, which means 'life force' in Icelandic, alludes to the aspirations of this work. Steina seeks to use video to create an experience of the energies that charge her own experience of the landscape of her origin. In this sense, her approach to making video artwork is akin to the act of musical composition. She evades intellectual or narrative concerns, and allows space for the viewer to inhabit the work through the process of meditating upon its motions, forms and rhythms.

Steina is also particularly interested in the act of tracing and charting those delicate movements of nature that are diminished by the immensity of a landscape or the overwhelming experience of being part of an unfamiliar atmosphere. Her desire is to show this landscape, this life force, through the act of visually transforming it: subverting the flow of the waves, tracing the movements of a bird flying, studying the bubbling of lava. As installed in ACMI's Transfigure exhibition, the projection screen is suspended in mid air inside the gallery, allowing the viewer to encounter the artist's vibrant perception of the landscape as a spatial experience. The visitor can move around and beneath the images as they play across the screen: an enlivening vision with the potential to alter our lived experience of the landscape. At the same time, it is possible to surrender to the careful sensory arrangements of music and image that make Steina's videos so important in the history of moving image art.

Steina is one of the most distinguished video artists working in the world today. Born in Iceland, she is a classically trained violinist who played with the Iceland National Orchestra. She relocated to New York in 1965 with her husband and collaborator, Woody Vasulka, where they founded celebrated artists' venue The Kitchen and began producing innovative video works. Combining a uniquely musical visual approach with complex experimentation in electronic imaging, Steina's works have been celebrated worldwide. She received the Maya Deren Award in 1992 and has exhibited at Ars Electronica, Linz, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. In 1999, she simultaneously showed three installations in three countries: Nuna in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Textures in Reykjavík, Iceland, and Machine Vision in Milan, Italy. She now lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Website links

Steina's website
http://www.vasulka.org

Archive of video art compiled by the artist
http://www.artscilab.org/VasulkaArchive.html

Daniel Langlois Foundation
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/collection/vasulka/archives/index.html

My background is in music. For me, it is the sound that leads me into the image. Every image has its own sound and in it I attempt to capture something flowing and living. I apply the same principle to art as to playing the violin: with the same attitude of continuous practice, the same concept of composition. Since my art schooling was in music, I do not think of images as stills, but always as motion. My video images primarily hinge upon an undefined sense of time with no earth gravity. It is like a duty to show what cannot be seen except with the eye of media: water flowing uphill or sideways, upside down rolling seas or a weather beaten drop of a glacier melt. The idea is that perhaps the audience could feel a part of this creative trance, living for a moment in a mental world where they have never been.