Steina Vasulka

Born 1940 in Reykjavic, Iceland, Steina Vasulka has studied music, engineering, theater as well as film and television production. She and Woody Vasulka met in the early 1960's and later moved to New York around 1965 where Steina initially worked as a freelance musician. Steina and Woody studied the mechanics and electronic nature of video and audio, moving them on to develop custom image creating/manipulating tools.
























They then went on to pioneer their video art collaborations at The Whitney Museum to document the NY's rapidly growing underground culture.

"We were interested in certain decadent aspects of America, the phenomena of the time—underground rock and roll, homosexual theater, and the rest of the illegitimate culture. In the same way, we were curious about more puritanical concepts of art inspired by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. It seemed a strange and unified front—against the establishment."

Later on in 1971, the Vasulka's created a project called "The Kitchen", which essentially worked as a media arts theater, displaying many pieces at once, each individually engineered, allowing many different, customized pieces of video equipment to be showcased at once.

Since 1980, they've both been based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they've carried on pushing the boundaries of film and video production.
Beneath is two of my favorite videos - many of their work uses forms of time displacement or primitive light/dark bump mapping.





Many video artists have obviously been inspired by the Vasulkas, most clearly though (I think) is Daniel Swan - his homage to slit-scanning and keying can clearly be seen in his works:



Here's my own little ripoff: