Orka portrays the wilderness of Iceland and first premiered at the 1997 Venice Biennale when Steina Vasulka was chosen as the country’s first female representative. A revolutionary in many ways, Steina spearheaded the first women’s video art festival in 1972, only a year after she and her husband Woody founded the Kitchen in New York, an experimental institution for video, performance, and cross-disciplinary art, which continues to shape the lives and careers of numerous artists to this day. Documenting the traces and movement of birds, insects, and the various paths of naturalistic life in her native country, Steina offers an alternative to a conventional way of experiencing nature, the view from the camera. Sometimes describing the work as a visual symphony and free-floating imagery, she refers to her background as a classically trained violinist. Nothing remains at a standstill, one thing leads to another. Water continuously flows uphill or to the sides, and gravity and time become as malleable as the image itself.

Coincidentally, a series weathered by time and natural forces, Lucifer’s Commission (Iris Print Series 1977-2003) is the title of Woody Vasulka’s series of abstract images that started as film-printed stencils for electronic circuits, later rescued by the artist at a military junkyard in Los Alamos. Left exposed to the natural elements for many years by Vasulka, he later scanned, enlarged, and printed the images, which embody hidden stories of climate change, nuclear testing, technological symbolism, and the relationship between human existence and the impermanence of media and memory.

Woody’s art is in many ways informed by his background as a filmmaker and engineer, continuously seeking to push the envelope of the video medium itself, rather than using it as a narrative vehicle. Many of the tools developed by the Vasulkas helped shape the medium into what it is today, through their exploration into formal language specific to the video genre, such as keying, feedback, and other real-time effects, furthering a new outlook on the medium.
Additionally, such preoccupation with machinery and the rejection of content may have sprung from youth in wartime former Czechoslovakia, as the title of his print series further suggests.

Ultimately, Steina and Woody’s cross-disciplinary explorations into printmaking were made possible by their technological investigations into analog and digital processes, which places them among the primary architects of an electronic vocabulary of image-making. Their work has been exhibited at major museums and festivals worldwide, including the Whitney Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Berlin Film Festival, and they both became Guggenheim fellows in the 1970s. Their works are in collections such as the Tate Museum in the UK, The Whitney Museum, MOMA and SFMOMA in the US, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, and many more. They’ve received honorary doctorate degrees from esteemed universities such as the San Francisco Art Institute, and together they worked to develop the Center for Media Studies at the State University of New York in Buffalo. For the past two years, Boston’s MIT List Visual Art Center has been preparing a retrospective of Steina’s works, scheduled to open on October 26th. Woody Vasulka passed in 2019, and Steina Vasulka lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, US.