Somersault, 1982
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 5:15 minutes
Courtesy of the Artist and BERG Contemporary
Somersault is part of Steina’s Machine Vision series and was realised after her move from Buffalo to New Mexico. A glass tube containing a convex mirror is fixed to the camera lens, allowing the camera to record its own reflection alongside the environment and the artist’s body.
As Steina carries and rotates the camera, the mirror maintains a constant relation to the lens. In physical space the camera moves, while in video space the lens appears fixed at the centre of the frame and the surrounding world rotates around it.