Description

This program looks at Steina's earliest video works, produced in the 1970s and early '80s. After producing a pioneering body of work with Woody Vasulka at the beginning of the decade, Steina pursued the electronic interrelation of sound and image; the use of mechanized, pre-programmed image devices for explorations of perception, space, and modes of seeing. The program includes Orbital Obsessions, Steina's mesmerizing meditation on time, space, movement and the "mechanized decision-making of instruments"; Flux, a frenetic experiment in perceptual abstraction, created with lightening fast video switching, footage of flowing water and video noise; Summer Salt, a mechanically and electronically mediated exploration of the Southwestern landscape; and Steina's unconventional self-portrait, Violin Power, described by the artist as a "a demo tape on how to play video on the violin."