Vašulka Mediascape

Steina re-performing a personal archive in Violin Power

“During my early 1990s visit the Vašulkas were deeply involved in two projects that involved cataloguing and resituating their own archives for new audiences — some eventually for online access, and in the case of Eigenwelt der Apparate-welt/ Pioneers of Electronic Art, for an exhibition of custom-made tools from the 60s and 70s, along with schematics and tapes made with these tools, that the Vašulkas were organizing for Ars Electronica festival in Austria. It seemed to me that the Vašulkas’ longtime dialogue with tools and commitment to sharing information was being exercised to respond to and educate a new generation. In Santa Fe in the early-90s, on the cusp of the new digital era, our conversations shifted between Woody’s investigation of digital file formats and internet bandwidth that would define the parameters of user interactivity for an online archive in the near future, and Steina’s encyclopedic memory of the events of the early video scenes and “tribes” in New York, and the first years of the Kitchen, which the Vašulkas had co-founded in 1971. All access to tapes and information were offered to me with a generosity of spirit that I had not experienced elsewhere in my research [for Surveying the First Decade, 1996]. When I see a performance of Violin Power, I also see Steina the archivist, an artist who continues to re-perform video fragments and glimpses of earlier projects, re-engaged through new incarnations of Violin Power.”

Chris Hill, “Introduction to Steina’s Performance of Violin Power,” at Steina: Involving People into this Magic, exhibition at Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY (2011).