Steina

The first comprehensive monograph in over a decade celebrating the work of pioneering video artist Steina, who is known for pushing perspective beyond the human-centered realm.


Accompanying the related exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Steina: Playback brings renewed recognition to Steina (b. 1940, Iceland), tracing her oeuvre from early collaborative works with her partner Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity. It follows her practice from downtown New York to Buffalo to the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Iceland, which appear in her immersive video environments of the 1990s and 2000s. Venturing into nature and combining imaging technologies with reflective orbs, Steina reorientated the human body’s relationship to nature and expanded how we access the natural world through media.

Scholars including Gloria Sutton, Joey Heinen, and Ina Blom consider how Steina’s generative sense of play gave way to methods of processing and computation; contextualize Steina alongside a group of her peers who shared an obsession with the electronic signal; and argue for her interest in video as a proto-virtual space. Steina has never felt more relevant.

Steina, born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir, studied violin and music theory in Reykjavik before attending the State Music Conservatory in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1965, she emigrated to New York City. By the late 1960s, she began to focus entirely on video work, and in 1971, cofounded The Electronic Kitchen (later The Kitchen), an experimental electronic media space. Her work has been shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and many other places.

A copublication with the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Buffalo AKG Art Museum