Seite 2: pop~PROFILE

Born in Iceland in 1940, Steina attended the Music Conservatory in Prague from 1959 to 1963. She joined the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra in 1964, and came to the USA the following year. She participated in the development of electronic arts as a co-founder of The Kitchen in 1970, a major exhibition and performance art center in NYC. She is continually exploring the possibilities for the generation and manipulation of the elctronic image through a broad range of technological tools and aesthetic concerns. Her tapes have been extensively broadcast and exhibited in the USA and Europe.

In 1978, she had an exhibit, "Machine Vision", at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1976 and has received various other grants. Since moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1980, Steina has produced a series of video tapes relating to the land, and an installation entitled TheWest. In 1989, she spent six months in Japan, on a US-Japan Fellowship, and produced video and installations based on her experiences there.

In 1992, Steina and Woody Vasulka curated a historically important exhibition for the Ars Electronica Fwstival, called "Pioneers of Electronic Art" which gathered together the equipment and devises of a generation of artists and communication scientists - those who began the important development work with Electronic technolgy. This exhibition was a search for the formal concerns of the media. It dealt with the electronic image much in the same way that film scholars were used to dealing with the syntax of film. It was the first archeological dig of the media community.