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TOKYO FOUR 1991
A VIDEO MATRIX BY STEINA
No form of moving-image art comes as close to musical composition as multiscreen video, where the different channels of image and sound are equivalent to musical polyphony, each functioning like a voice in a musical ensemble. And no multiscreen work is as spectacularly musical as Steina’s. She works as a composer would, playing on the visual equivalents of timbre, texture, and tone. Tokyo Four is the audio-visual equivalent of a string quartet. In one compositional strategy, Steina begins by assembling a long single-channel segment which represents the “melody,” or what she calls the “ground track.” Sometimes one screen is the melody and the others are accompaniment, then another screen takes the lead. A musical syntax emerges from this visual point/counterpoint. . . .
TOKYO FOUR is organized around categories of imagery: Shinto priests meticulously grooming their Zen garden on New Year’s Eve; train conductors monitoring rush hour crowds; elevator girls bringing a superfluous, but charming High Touch to the high tech world of the shopping malls, reminding shoppers to watch their umbrellas and to not forget their children; a segment about food, beginning with the vertiginous fisheye lens in a supermarket; and an emotionally charged metachoreog-raphy of a dance troupe’s performance and curtain call. Her compositional devices include flipping or reversing an image and playing it at imperceptibly different speeds on different screens, which gradually all synchronize at the same speed. These strategies are especially effective in the final movement when the female dancer is bowing. The Lehars’ waltz the dancers use would be banal without the manipulations of Steina’s spectacular visual matrix, which transforms it into something at once exotic and poignant.
— GENE YOUNGBLOOD
 
D E S C R I P T I O N
TOKYO FOUR is a four video, four audio channel installation with twenty-three minute repeating program. Each of the four laser disk players provide one video and two audio sources to 12 video monitors and four speakers. A video synchronizer aligns the four channels of video for synchronous playback. At the end of each cycle, the program automatically returns and re-synchronizes for a repeat performance.