STEINA – Orka Combined
I was lucky enough to witness this amazing video installation at the Colorado State University Art museum in the fall of 2011. Unfortunately, at the time, I was unfamiliar with this artist, and didn’t appreciate the significance of the work until now.
Catalyst introduced me to the 70’s era Steina Vasulka, a young vivacious Icelandic, living in NYC, playfully experimenting with the newest technologies of those times. In Sound and Fury (1975) she has placed two cameras in a ‘duel’, the self reflecting machines programmed to record at alternating rhythms, witnessing, creating and recording the duality that exists in everything. The artist has a disorienting dance with herself, Steina moves about between the two lenses, her experimental movements becoming a performance. The work began as a test, Steina states in this video interview, (see ~22:00) she had no intention of exhibiting the work, however, the results of her experiment were so surprisingly delightful that the work had to be seen, the phenomenon of seeing both sides at once, an early meta moment of the ‘selfie’. The media teaching the artist what it could do.
Orka Combined was a new interpretation using some of Steina’s earlier works, recycling and layering the videos, creating a new exhibit. The university gallery had been transformed into a full sensory immersive environment with several videos projected on large round screens, taking up the majority of the space. The viewer is invited to enter and “meditate on the relationship between our bodies and the cosmos”. Steina has combined the complicated high tech machines, cameras and computers, with life’s most basic organic elements, the close up images of earth and water, making “matter matter”, her work, less narrative, more a focus on human experience, and appreciating each second for what it brings. The short videos, the darkened room, the close spaces, the large scale environment, all theses elements encouraged the viewer to experience the work with their full bodies, the rhythmic sounds and switching clips mimicking the patterns of our own circulation and respiration. The work makes “the digital imagery behave in the manner of human memory: able to pack loads of info into the small space of the mind’s-eye,” and lures the visitor into the “sensual mysteries” of our physical world. (Quotes from exhibition essay by Los Angeles Times art critic, David Pagel)
Steina states, “to show what cannot be seen except with the eye of media: water flowing uphill or sideways, upside down rolling seas or a weather beaten drop of a glacier melt. The idea is that perhaps the audience could feel a part of this creative trance, living for a moment in a mental world where they have never been.” The work takes you there.
Here is a link to a video installation work that is similar to what I saw.
Cofrin Contemporary 