Steina: “I did not mean the first segment of Violin Power to be so serious. I had just discovered video and, same as everybody, wanted to see what I looked like … A few months later I did another same as everybody trick: lip-synching to the Beatles song Let It Be. A few years later I was living in Buffalo, NY and in the fall/winter of 1975-76 I set up endless situations of observations … My set-ups would typically be a camera observing a space, another camera observing that camera or observing the monitor displaying the camera observing the space, and so forth. In this vein of working, I picked up my violin, and turned the camera towards me and had the sound of the violin determine the distortion of the video.”

“The Violin Power project, re-articulated always with a violin and live image processing, but with different control devices and different footage over its 30 year lifetime, was born during the time the Vašulkas lived and worked in Buffalo, from 1973-1980…. One might see Steina’s early history as a classically trained violinist reflected in her initial selection of the violin as an instrument to interface live with cameras, oscillators, and various hand-built tools. In Steina’s work of the mid 70s that includes both Violin Power and a second corpus of work called Machine Vision, there is a musical sensibility to the phrases or displays of multi-channel or rapidly switched video images that can suggest a string quartet’s polyphonic structures.” [also see Violin Power, with MIDI violin]