Music in the Afternoon

Fellow violinist and artist Tony Conrad, in collaboration with software engineer Tom Demeyer, made for Steina the instrument seen in this title. Conrad and the Vasulkas all taught at the University at Buffalo in the Media Study Department from 1976 to 1979.

Warp

In Warp, Steina makes use of her two favourite features of the Image/ine software, written by Tom Demeyer. The first feature – ‘warp’ – is a time delay software, which scans one line at the time, leaving the rest of the image motionless. With the second feature – ‘slit scan’ – a point or line in a continuously moving image is captured and streamed forward.

Lilith

Against a field of swaying and halting yellow vegetation, another processed field: the image of the eponymous subject (performed by painter Doris Cross) riles and emits unintelligibly to the viewer. Conjuring the mystical biblical character Lilith, Steina's video layers both sound and image to produce an ever-shifting, frustrated presence.

Somersault

Using one half of a convex mirror mounted within a glass cylinder, Steina trains the video camera eye dead center as she records the space immediately around her. “Steina playfully does gymnastics with her camera and its mirrored lens attachment as a means of producing a 360-degree image of a torso wrapped around the camera lens . . . an exercise in an immersive space” for both maker and viewer. —Yvonne Spielmann