STEINA VASULKA
Falling into Unknown Space......
STEINA is one of the few women media artists who needs only one name. She came to media art from music, and has worked with her partner and collaborator Woody Vasulka, for three decades. In 1996, Steina will assume the duties of Artistic co-Director for the Dutch research center for music, STEIM. Uprooting, and going to Amsterdam to live and work is a move which she equates to "fallling into unknown space...".
Pop~TARTS met Steina at The Butterfly Effect [1] symposium, an event called The Moment Before Discovery, where she performed her vintage interactive performance "Violin Power" and made a few observations about how it operated. In fact, she completely demystified the interactive proecess after she finished her performance by opening up the control box and telling the audience how simple it worked, sort of like a remote control for the TV....!
Her installation in the exhibition, a historical research installation made with Woody, gave some valuable insights into the development of interactive processes.
A networker from her earliest years in media, Steina is also an avid collector of videotapes, and she is well know for her eagerness to share information about emerging artists with others. In her text in the art and technology journal "Leonardo" entitled "My Love Affair with Art: Video and Installation Work" Steina Vasulka discusses some of her works and the contexts in which they have been created. Her discussion ranges from the early days of video art in New York...
When we asked her what she thought about the concept and name Pop~TARTS, she laughed and said a joyful YES, why not! Women should call themselves prostitutes! They are, it fits. And this was at breakfast, with only a few hours of sleep the night before, and departing for San Francisco, full of good humor and advice, she was prepared for the long journey to the opening of a large exhibition of VASULKA power, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, taking place the following day.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [3]
Wired since 1988, Steina thanks Joe Ryan for bringing her into the world of electronic communication. Living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for many years, she and Woody have been continuously connected from an otherwise isolated part of the world. A self proclaimed image maker, Steina confesses that her interest in theory is not nearly as intense as WoodyŽs. In fact, she preferes to concentrate on the form. She is constantly searching for creative interfaces between the image and ideas, and seeks the best way to produce the icons, formats and structures for interactive applications. She feels that men have mostly been the ones to make these applications, while in her experience women use them. But, she hopes that in the near future, men will also want to play.
Steina combines her intense curiosity for creating images with the necessity to develop media tools and techniques in order to achieve the results she envisions.
In June 1995, Steina contributed a frame from her video to The World's Women On-Line! on the occasion of the International Womens conference in Bejing, China.
In 1996, Steina will assume the duties of Artistic co-Director for the Dutch research center for music, STEIM. Uprooting, and going to Amsterdam to live and work is a move which she equates to "fallling into unknown space...". She hopes to use the institute for her own research - realizing that "you are always behind...no matter what... with regard to the technology. She feels that it is most important to know where the technology is going, rather than to master it all.
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.
pop~TOPIC
The media pioneer STEINA discusses art and practice as a way of life.
Pop~TARTS will explore the following topics, common in electronic culture, and each of the Pop~PERSONS with a relevant theme, related to their practice or theoretical work. Steina is presented for her pioneering work in the field of new media art, which in the 1970s was video and electronic music. Her interest to find the interface between theory and practice is an intuitive process, which has only recently become a respected female contribution in the computer, electronic and scientific communities.
topic: - INTIMACY
topic: - THEORY
topic: - MEDIALE OBERFLAECHEN
topic: - PIONIERS and newcomers
topic: - REALPOLITICS
pop~EVENT
"The Butterfly Effect: The Coordinates of the moment before Discovery" was the 1995/96 annual exhibition of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Budapest. Curated by Suzanne Meszoly and Miklos Peternak, the exhibition was based on the phenomena of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, fundamental to chaos theory. It was a strategy to openup the eyes of the international community to the rich and various achievements of the inventors, scientists and techno-freaks in Hungary from the past Century. Steina and Woody Vasulka presented a selection of media relics created by artists as part of the exhibition, "Current Coordinates" and SteinaŽs "Violin Power" was the final event in the Symposium "The Moment Before Discovery", January 23, 1996.
pop~MAIL
We invite you to mail us regarding issues relating to Steina, to the history of video, and new media art. Please feel free to comment on the links, and the selected reference sites. Your responses and will be edited and our answers will be inserted into the updated mail folder of this Pop~PROFILE, similar to newsgroup forums.
pop~TAGS
Here you can see a short videotag of Steina, and her live performance, talk
and interview with us in Budapest!
The men are the pathfinders or pathmakers, but the women are the
walkers, says Steina.:walk_e.mov
URL dieses Artikels:
https://www.heise.de/-3441997
Links in diesem Artikel:
[1] http://www.scca.hu
[2] http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/Leonardo/isast/journal/vasu281.html
[3] http://www.sfmoma.org/moma/
[4] http://wwol.inre.asu.edu/vasulka.html
[5] http://www.scca.hu/WWWdev/Vasulkas/vasulka.html
Copyright © 1996 Heise Medien