Instruments and Environments
The works presented trace Steina‘s recurring approaches to image-making, positioning video as a live, spatial, and time-based medium across analogue* and digital* systems. Together, they introduce the working vocabulary through which her images are produced. Steina has used the term environment from an early stage in her practice to describe works that transform and activate space through light, sound, movement, and duration. Her sustained engagement with this form contributed to its development as a distinct mode of artistic practice, and to an expanded understanding of exhibition-making as a process that unfolds in time.
The space is organised through an alternating ten-minute loop, the duration of Borealis. Playback, a defining tool across Steina‘s practice, structures the room itself: the loop generates two states, each with its own spatial and perceptual conditions. In the first, Borealis is presented as a projected environment within the room. As this state recedes, the space divides into smaller rooms in which singlechannel works on CRT monitors are presented.
These works were developed through cameras, videotape, optical attachments, electronic switching devices, and software. Although presented as recorded works, they originated as real-time experiments in image manipulation. Across them, the body, often Steina‘s own, enters the system as a point of orientation and testing.
1:
Borealis, 1993
Two-channel video, four-channel sound environment, 10:28 minutes
Courtesy of the Artist and BERG Contemporary
2:
Warp, 2000
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 4:13 minutes
Courtesy of the Artist and BERG Contemporary
3:
Flux, 1977
Single-channel video, black and white, sound, 8:11 minutes
Courtesy of ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medien)
4:
In the Land of the Elevator Girls, 1989
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 4:16 minutes
Courtesy of the Artist and BERG Contemporary
5:
Somersault, 1982
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 5:15 minutes
Courtesy of the Artist and BERG Contemporary
6:
Urban Episodes, 1980
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 8:50 minutes
Instrumentation by Josef Krames, Woody Vasulka and Bruce Hamilton
Courtesy of the Artist and BERG Contemporary
7:
Bad, 1979
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 2:10 minutes
Courtesy of the Artist and BERG Contemporary