Vašulka Mediascape

Steina, The West, installation (1983)

“Between taping and editing, there is usually an intermediary step during which I alter and mix the images, change color or run things upside down or backwards. This is where the particular uniqueness of working with the electronic image comes into play. It is somewhat akin to photographic darkroom techniques but it really reminds me of playing an instrument. I change style, timbre, dynamics and key in an improvisational and spontaneous way.”

Steina, “My Love Affair with Art: Video and Installation Work,” in Leonardo (1995), and in Buffalo Heads, Woody Vašulka & Peter Weibel, eds, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2008); link: https://www.vasulka.org/archive/Publications/FormattedPublications/Leonardo.pdf.

Steina: “It’s such a cliché to move to the southwest and become a landscape artist. But of course I got seduced like anybody else … There was a solution, and the solution for me was to take just a part of it, take the texture, take some details, and farm them out on multiple images. To make like several channels, and have the images move from one to the other. So, that way in some strange way I fooled myself at least, into a kind of suggestion of spatiality. An imitation of a kind of sensational space you have out there … And I became very enamored of doing this kind of landscape installations. The West was the first one, and then Geomania, where I combine the southwest with Iceland.”

Peter Kirby, Binary Lives (1997), video transcript https://www.eai.org/titles/binary-lives/supportdocs/35.