individual "delivering" you space.... It was a challenge to me to create a space that would not deal with the idiosyncrasies of human vision. 34 Signifying Nothing (1975), Sound and Fury (1975), and Switch! Monitor! Drift! (1976) are all documentations of Steina interacting with studio set-ups in which two motorized cameras monitor not only the surrounding space but the movement of the other camera. The most complex of these is Switch! Monitor! Drift! which consists of 13 scenes that variously combine the two cameras' automated movements with assorted effects achieved by keying, switching, horizontal drift, and scan processing. The result is not merely technologically impressive, but cerebral: the dislocation of the picture plane forces the viewer to make sense of the surrounding fragmented space. In these tapes Steina is observing the system observing her and repositioning herself in the space in response. In the installations Allvision No. 1 (1978) and No. 2 (1978-79), set up respectively at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo and at The Kitchen, these contraptions become, at once kinetic sculptures and activators of the seeing process. Two cameras are mounted on the ends of a slowly revolving axis with a perfectly spherical mirror at the center of the axis. On the monitors, viewers see an artificially created 360-degree image. While the viewers are part of the "real" space, they can at the same time see themselves in the 'imaginary' dimension created on the screens. 35 Allvision fragments and reconstructs reality and, in so doing, challenges us to participate in the deciphering process. Robert Haller aptly summed up this series: "[These pieces) sunder the sense of the 'true' in favor of the act of perception, demanding active seeing rather than the passive look. 36 At this time Steina also began to use her violin to control the video image. Violin Power (1970-78) begins with Steina playing a classical piece and proceeds from that to electronic music. The violin patched through an audio synthesizer to a video switcher then activates switching between two camera views of Steina playing. (This scene constitutes one segment of Switch! Monitor! Drift!) Similarly, in other segments the violin generates other image and sound distortions. Violin Power is another demonstration of the Vasulkas' use of sound to create video. For Steina, both sound and imaging devices are instruments. In this case, starting with a traditional musical instrument, the relationship is eloquently made obvious. Much of her subsequent work reiterates these themes, but her methods vary, as do the results. For example, for Urban Episodes (1980) Steina constructed yet another motorized -->> next page |