Steina: Playback

Friday, March 14, 2025–Monday, June 30, 2025

Steina, *Orbital Obsessions*, 1975–77 (still). Single-channel video, black and white, sound; 24:24 min. Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary, Reykjavík

Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building
Floor 1

Steina: Playback presents the first solo exhibition in over a decade of Steina, the pathbreaking media artist whose work traverses video, performance, and installation. Since cofounding The Kitchen in New York City in 1971, Steina has created works shaped by her experimental approach to electronic processing tools, persistent explorations of what she called “machine vision,” and an enduring ethos of play. A classically trained violinist, Steina took up video in 1970, bringing to her new instrument—initially a Sony Portapak—a musician’s attention to the “majestic flow of time.” Unlike many of her peers working in video in its early decades, the Icelandic-born artist did not consider US television culture a central force against which her video activity was defined. Instead, human perception was a key site of confrontation as she sought the exuberant and even utopian possibilities of an “intelligent, yet not human vision.”

Steina also shaped the avant-garde media arts environment that characterized Buffalo in the 1970s. Steina: Playback represents a homecoming for the artist, who taught at the Center for Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo in that decade, and exhibited at the Albright-Knox in 1978 in The VASULKAS / Steina: Machine Vision, Woody: Descriptions.

With more than a dozen single-channel works, as well as multi-monitor arrays and multi-channel environments, this focused retrospective surveys Steina’s fearless DIY approach to new media and her pioneering synthesis of the electronic and the natural. While Steina’s early collaborative works with her life partner Woody Vasulka centered largely around the pair’s obsession with video’s signal and the custom-designed hardware that could distort and manipulate it, her independent works from 1975 onward probe the limits of human perspective and pursue non-anthropocentric modes of visualizing the natural world. - [Image of a dark room with large screens that are closeups of vibrant colors/materials]

Throughout her career, her works were continually shaped by her shifting environments: from downtown New York’s avant-garde and Buffalo’s experimental media arts scene of the 1970s, to the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Iceland. In her works from the 1990s onward, new projection technologies allowed her video environments to become even more immersive: flows of river, waves, light, and wind spatialize what the human eye cannot see and seem to offer analogues of the electronic flow of video and audio signals. With her distinctive translation of musical modes, like polyphony, into the visual realm and her effort to exceed human perception, Steina reveals an electronic sublime and attunes us to the vibrant, invisible energies inherent to both video and natural phenomena.

Steina, *Geomania*, 1986 (still). Two-channel multi-monitor video installation, color, sound; 15 min. Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary, Reykjavík

Steina with Jeffrey Schier and Woody Vasulka, *Cantaloup*, 1980 (still). Single-channel video, color, sound; 27:54 min. Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary, Reykjavík

Steina, *Summer Salt*, 1982 (still). Single-channel video, color, sound; 19:10 min. Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary, Reykjavík

Installation view of *The VASULKAS / Steina: Machine Vision, Woody: Descriptions,* Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1978. Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble

View of Steina and Woody Vasulkas's studio in Sante Fe, New Mexico, 1978. Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble

Steina: Playback is organized by MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is curated by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center and Helga Christoffersen Curator-at-Large and Curator, Nordic Art and Culture Initiative, Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

About the Catalogue

Accompanying the exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, is a brand new monograph, Steina, that brings renewed recognition to the artist, tracing her oeuvre from early collaborative works with her partner Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity. The first comprehensive monograph in over a decade, this book celebrates the work of the pioneering video artist. Contributors include scholars Gloria Sutton, Joey Heinen, and Ina Blom, who consider how Steina's generative sense of play gave way to methods of processing and computation; contextualize Steina alongside a group of her peers who shared an obsession with the electronic signal; and argue for her interest in video as a proto-virtual space.

Audio Guide

For over fifty years, the artist Steina has been creating groundbreaking work by embracing the tools of video processing. The exhibition explores the artist’s work from 1969 to 2000. In this audio guide, we’ll hear from Steina’s students, former colleagues and collaborators, and those she influenced and inspired.

Learn More