The Strange Sublime of Video and Nature

“Why is video not examined in terms of its dynamic relationship to the other arts? Why are video’s impact and large role in an increasingly digital future not being scrutinized?”1 These questions, originally posed by John G. Hanhardt and Maria Christina Villaseñor in the pages of Art Journal in 1995, have received traction well into this century. Institutional exhibitions have sought to link video art of the 1960s and 1970s with other art and media formats by finding parallels between issues of digital surveillance, identity politics, and government censorship.2 By creating a genealogy between today’s ubiquitous image-driven digital media landscape with video art and activist practices of the 1960s and 1970s, a canon of early video art has been incorporated into contemporary art through its relationship to social and political issues, including its racialized and gendered modes of address. One can hardly fail to encounter screens at museums today. Should we rejoice now that video art has a seat at the table? If the now-institutionalized significance of early video and its largely obsolete technologies of the Portapak, analog switching equipment, and cathode-ray-tube (CRT) monitors lies with the ability to create alternative networks for broadcast and distribution that otherwise seek to transform the world, then what do we do with video’s weirdos, its punks and DIY anarchists?

Steina: Playback, organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, takes an intimate approach to Steina, one of video art’s originals who spent a lifetime experimenting with video tools and software as a type of partner, collaborator, or comrade.3 The heavily researched exhibition, with ample archival material lining the gallery walls and a 200-plus-page catalogue, shows daringly little contextualization of Steina’s work within contemporary art as a whole. The retrospective instead adheres closely to Steina's personal concerns, including her interest in collective practice between video artists and musicians. While not overtly political in aim, the exhibition clarifies that, while Steina may have been regarded as an “apolitical formalist” into the 2000s, the artist’s lifelong interest in collaboration was itself a political act.

Playback noticeably treats the monographic format with a lighter hand than one might expect in a career retrospective: Nine out of the exhibition’s twenty-five works receive co-billing with other practitioners, and several more works list collaborators on instrumentation and sound. By comparison, Steina’s first and previously-only solo retrospective in the United States, Steina: 1970–2000, curated by Laura Steward Heon and Liza Statton in 2008 for SITE Santa Fe, contained thirty-one works with Steina given solo billing for all works, even those noted by the MIT List Center for Visual Arts as collaborative creations.4 While Playback features an array of video monitors and screens, including towering installations, the exhibition design is economical: Most of the videos are between ten and twenty minutes in length, no “sound bleed” disrupts screenings from one room to another, and plenty of white space between installations allows for singular works to breathe.

The videos themselves—featuring fast-moving landscapes, bodies, and graphical objects that flash and flutter with sound generated from the same signals—are given enough space not to be overwhelming or nauseating. (I do not recommend this exhibition for anyone sensitive to strobe lighting-type effects; however, according to a note in the guestbook, it might be a pleasant exhibition for anyone with ADHD.5) Tight and tidy curatorial gestures dispense with egoism and bombast, allowing for a compelling focus on how machines can playfully perceive the world around them. In so doing, unrealized and under-known connections can emerge; the exhibition begins with the shared visual contexts between video art and computer graphics, as well as structuralist film and music, and opens up to video’s capacity as an environmental-sensing technology. Overall, Playback is an ambitiously installed, intensively archival, and ultimately consequential retrospective.

Steina, born in Reykjavik as Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir, is perhaps most well known for her foundational role in transforming countercultural video into a communal affair by cofounding The Kitchen—one of New York City’s oldest non-profit spaces for experimental art practices—with her life partner, the late Woody Vasulka. They collaborated on videos in the 1960s. Still, Steina’s role wasn’t always acknowledged, perhaps best evinced by Woody’s hiring as one of the first faculty members of the Department of Media Study at the University of Buffalo. Steina also taught in the department but was unpaid, as the exhibition’s introductory documentation wall evidences with correspondence between Steina and the university. Many of the works created from this time received equal billing by both artists as they went deep into crafting handmade and modded software tools to experiment with the graphic visualization of audio and visual signals, often with a “psychedelic” effect. Starting in 1974, the two practices began to take different directions, eventually resulting in more narrative work by Woody, like The Art of Memory (1987). By 1980, the couple left Buffalo and settled down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a move that profoundly shifted Steina’s working concerns toward an increasingly environmental focus on the artificial and natural landscapes of the Southwest while still participating in the formation of communities centered around experimental electronics.

The exhibition layout reflects the general chronology of Steina’s life and working practice, beginning with collaborative videos before moving into her more autonomous practice. Upon entering Playback, visitors were offered a set of options: Directly in front of them, the white-walled gallery had been transformed into a cozy library nook featuring books on video art, where visitors could sit on round, red-cushioned modular wood seats or use a tablet to access further information about the Vasulkas on a web-based timeline. The library could be skipped, moving instead to Orbital Obsessions (1975–1977), screened on a display monitor in the same space. Orbital Obsessions is a modest choice for an entry point into an exhibition: it’s a black-and-white compilation set in the Vasulkas’s shared Buffalo studio that provides a lighthearted glimpse into their playful experimentation with video. The video, made by an off-screen camera apparatus that spins on its axis—and is on view in the main gallery in the installation Allvision (1976)—gives a 360-view, with Steina and Woody sometimes casually appearing on screen, discussing options for zooming, panning, and other means for exploring machinic vision. Steina asks and demands, presumably from Woody: “Is that too much? Too little? So, correct it.” Neither seems to have ultimate control over the camera, though they try to help it see itself by providing monitors, cameras, and other reflective surfaces.

In a corridor peeking into the main galleries, posters, flyers, and correspondence pulled from the Vasulkas’s archives line the walls, charting their practice's lived, social context: The Black Panthers requested a video from the pair for their “international anti-imperialist revolutionary” tape library; the Provost’s Office at the University of Buffalo sent a letter notifying Steina of her unpaid appointment as Adjunct Lecturer; other general ephemera show the Vasulkas’s involvement in various art and technology scenes after their move to New Mexico. These documents help cast doubt on any lingering ascriptions of “apolitical formalism,” and they help open up how Steina’s personal and lived experiences were, of course, already political.

The main exhibition gallery had an open floor plan with one partition wall that didn’t specify any particular route through the work on view. I was first drawn to Matrix I (1970–72), a variable installation presented as a three-by-three grid of CRT monitors on which black-and-white geometric abstractions morph, melt, roll, dissolve, wobble, and shiver. But I just as well could have walked nearer the rotating crossbar, cameras, and gleaming orb of Allvision (1976)—the unseen “gizmo” in Orbital Obsessions, which spun around the gallery at a steady, slow rate, screening its image live on one of two monitors that bracketed this installation. Or I could’ve begun with any one of the other single-channel monitors showing generative, biomorphic abstractions like Distant Activities (1972), credited to “The Vasulkas,” in which psychedelic-colored blobs morph into amorphous form after amorphous form by stretching, wobbling, and erupting. This flow of silly shapes felt like looking inside a lava lamp while listening to a hypnotic, machinic soundtrack. As with Orbital Obsessions, video’s value here lay in its ability to create images and sounds that were distinctly unfamiliar.

Into the 1970s, the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, a type of analog computer that shifts images vertically and horizontally, played a key role in Steina and Woody Vasulka’s experiments with making visible video’s strange and playful machinic vision. Matrix I demonstrates the Vasulkas’s frequent use of “horizontal drift,” a technical glitch that they transformed into an aesthetic technique in which images appear to roll across other screens in real time; the technique is so common in their work that it’s sometimes called the “Vasulka effect.” While the video appears two-dimensional at first, resembling the 1920s abstract animated films of Hans Richter, the geometric forms become more voluminous, nearly bursting out of each frame as if transformed into electric golems. As presented here, Matrix I is only one possible variation: when screened in the 1970s, there was no single format or length, and the work can be extended to contain up to 16 monitors. As described by Gloria Sutton in the exhibition’s catalogue, each monitor in Matrix shows a “modular electronic image,” akin to a pixel.6 Sutton’s comparison points to the intersections of historical video and computer software practices, both of which saw developments in the production of 3-D graphics in the 1970s through manipulating signals and objects, respectively.7 As with all of their collaborative work, the Vasulkas played with the video signal’s image and sound capabilities. Processing tools transform video signals into audio and back again, creating the fuzzy, ecstatic, droning vibrations that characterize so many of the Vasulkas’s movement studies from this time. If you can stand stroboscopic effects, it’s hard not to get sucked into the video and its distinct world. But after a while, the queasiness starts, a reminder that human vision doesn’t always gear with that of a machine.

If the first part of the exhibition explored video’s machinic vision and its capabilities to generate new forms, the second gallery—noticeably darker with dimmed lighting—explores an interest in video’s ability to capture and give expression to the non-human landscape, including non-human ecosystems consisting of living and abiotic matter, whether Icelandic ponies, waters, satellites, or the high desert. Chronologically, these works are credited to Steina rather than “Vasulkas,” and, as of the 1990s, Steina’s interest in large-scale, projection-based installation also comes to the fore. The effect of Steina’s mature work is destabilizing; these are neither postcard versions of nature nor empathy-seeking portraits of a world in ruin (think: Koyaanisqatsi). Instead, hers is a version of landscape that W.J.T. Mitchell would call an “agent of power…independent of human intentions.”8 Nature is made unfamiliar rather than friendly, a realization of Steina’s aim for people “to live for a moment in a world where they’ve never been before.”9 In a time of increasingly unpredictable climate events, Steina’s strange landscapes become reminders of individual human frailty against the unknown.

Borealis (1993) offers such an exercise in human humility. The scale is elephantine, with four free-standing screens that create an open but labyrinthine path through the now-dim gallery. Instead of walking through a sea of fog, the sublime encounter encompasses being up close, with zoomed-in textures of Icelandic waters that churn out a mechanical and threatening rhythm. The effect was ecstatic: images drifted vertically and horizontally at different rates, as if one’s body surged upward with the water or drowned in it. Refik Anadol’s AI-generated work Unsupervised (2022)—on view in MoMA’s lobby from 2022 through 2023—came to mind, but unlike his glossy single-channel installation, Steina’s works are far more effective through their haptic play with texture and sound, and which are tethered more directly to the unpredictable ebbs and flows of real-world materials, whether the electronic signal or oceanic matter. Mynd (2000), a six-channel panorama, also took part in Steina’s interest in defamiliarizing the world—this time, Icelandic ponies participated in the time-warping, freeze-framing, and drifting.

At this point in the exhibition, certain techniques appear repetitive. Another up-close seascape, another horse, however transformed. But the strangest, most mesmerizing of all Steina’s environmental videos is the final work, the three-channel HD video Lava and Moss (2000). The fifteen-minute-long video sits in a black box all to itself, with any sense of a landscape merely a residual approximation: There are only wet, close-up surfaces like spongy lichens and volcanic rocks as if seen from an insect’s point of view—or that of a computer vision program like Google Deep Dream. Jarring camera movements align with a dissonant, thunderous soundtrack. The feedback reverberated throughout my body, giving me the impression that I was somehow inside nature’s guts. The effect was alien. The human eye and body weren’t made to feel welcome.

What type of world is video, then? Once envisioned as a type of comrade, video remains unfeeling in its digestion and transformation of all it sees. The wall label describes Lava and Moss in terms of how “questions of scale have reemerged as central to debates around the aesthetics of the Anthropocene.” It’s hard to say if Steina’s work would be granted such renewed relevance without the present concerns of human-predicated crisis. Its haptic, otherworldly forms of human and non-human sensemaking transform the environment into vibrant matter. What we do with such knowledge of nature made queer through video feedback isn’t clear-cut. This type of work cannot transform the world in terms of direct social action, but it can redirect how one experiences their environment—not as a landscape, but as an “agent of power,” however hostile it may be.

Contemporary ecological issues make a compelling case for how Steina’s brand of off-kilter videos resonates with larger issues in contemporary art practice today. But given Playback’s focus on Steina’s humor and technicity, her work resists any clean-cut categorization as “eco-art,” nevertheless any other single framing. Without over-imposing connections, Playback demonstrates the value of a monographic exhibition; when done well, it can illustrate nuance across difference, revealed through close attention to the artist’s working concerns and lived experience with others. Doing so diminishes the monograph’s negative potential to tread into the territory of the “solo genius” myth. The exhibition also accomplishes this by giving credit and plenty of screen time to Steina’s collaborators, whether human, machine, or other living matter. But, in this current institutional moment of historical video art’s renewal, curatorial connections could be tightened, not just between our contemporary moment and preceding ones, but between historical videos by the likes of Shigeko Kubota and Steina, both with recent solo exhibitions and whose videos transform the Earth’s landscapes through machinic vision, and without regard to extractive practices of manipulating the Earth into new forms. New visions can still be excavated from the past.

1 John G. Hanhardt and Maria Christina Villaseñor, “Video/Media Culture of the Late Twentieth Century,” Art Journal 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 20.

2 Although brief, a list of primarily U.S.–based institutional exhibitions linking historical video with contemporary screen-based work includes The Body Electric at the Walker Art Center (March 30, 2019–July 21, 2019) and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (September 6, 2019–January 26, 2020); Art and the Digital Screen at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (February 12–April 30, 2023); and Signals: How Video Transformed the World (March 5–July 8, 2023). Recent solo exhibitions of woman-identified artists associated with historical video art include Ulrike Rosenbach: today is tomorrow, held at the ZKM | Karlsruhe (June 24, 2023–February 4, 2024); Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality (Aug 21, 2021–Feb 13, 2022) at MoMA; and Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning (March 17– July 6, 2024), also at MoMA.

3 See “Inside Equipment (Studio Practice),” in Ina Blom, The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (Sternberg Press, 2016), 127–157.

4 Joanne Lefrak and Katia Zavistovski ed., Steina: 1970-2000 (SITE Santa Fe), 120–123.

5 On the day of my visit, December 4, 2024, a note was left in the guestbook stating, “This exhibit finally turned off my ADHD ‘Brain Radio.’ Totally relaxing for the nervous system. Very awesome.”

6 Gloria Sutton, “The Politics of Steina’s Computational Play,” in Steina, ed. Natalie Bell (MIT Press, 2024), 65.

7 In contrast to the signal-based processing of video explored by the Vasulkas, computer graphics researchers were developing iterative, “object-oriented systems that model the world based on material interactions.” See: Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press, 2021), 141.

8 W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, second edition (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2.

9 Steina Vasulka and Gene Youngblood, “Orbits of Fortune,” in Steina: 1970-2000, ed. Joanne Lefrak and Katia Zavistovski (SITE Santa Fe), 43.

Corinna Kirsch is an art historian, critic, and collaborator specializing in the 1960s and 1970s video, computation, and environmental practices and their afterlives in present-day digital media, art, and activism. Her criticism has appeared in publications ranging from Art Papers to Vice, and she received the inaugural C Magazine New Critics Award. Her academic writing has appeared in Art Journal, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and Panorama. Along with Rebecca Uliasz, she is the co-editor of the forthcoming Media-N special issue on “Media and Climate.” In 2021, she received a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Stills of Violin Power and Orbital Obsession: Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary, Reykjavík

Installation view of Allvision: Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble

All installation images: Photo: Dario Lasagni

This text was supported by a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities NY.