There is a moment in Lava and Moss, a three-channel installation by media artist Steina, when the soundtrack switches from woozy reverb and creaking groans to an amelodic percussion. The giant screens flicker from ice-bound volcanic rocks to sun-dappled grass and wobbly dandelion heads, and—though it is freezing outside of the MIT List, where this and the rest of “Steina: Playback” is housed—I am flooded with warmth. “It’s so disorienting,” whispers a nearby visitor, flinching away from the drunken spins of the video, and it is: both the piece itself and my sudden, unbidden nostalgia; it takes me a moment to realize what that bright staccato vision called up in me was a very young memory of rolling down a hill.
While perhaps not a common pastime for all, rolling down hills (on one’s own, in tractor tires, in giant barrels) was a deliciously joyful part of my ‘90s childhood in Appalachian Pennsylvania. That feeling of physically confronting the natural environment at dizzying speed—the sound pressing and jolting from all angles, the flower-crushed intimacy of the ground, the wide, stunning moment when you were spit out flat on your back to contend with sky and sky and sky looping above you—all of this is captured in those few brief minutes when Steina zooms out from the primordial creaking of the Iceland’s inner igneous guts and alights on its green surface.
I learn later, at home, perusing Steina’s digital archive, that the work is the Iceland-born artist’s own attempt to connect with childhood exuberance, to capture a landscape home to “elves and trolls,” and—using technological interventions honed from a lifetime pioneering new forms of electronic art-making—set it dancing.(1)
Created in 2000, Lava and Moss is the most recent work on view in “Playback,” the artist’s first solo exhibition in more than a decade. Situated alone in the List’s Bakalar Gallery, it is meant to be viewed last, as the show is organized chronologically. If one follows the more traditional path through the artist’s life, they would enter the Hayden and Reference Galleries and begin with Orbital Obsessions (1975–77), which was filmed in Steina’s studio in Buffalo, NY; coil around to the video’s sculptural progeny Allvision (1976); discover the digital waverings of Flux (1977) and other layered video installations; and end with Steina’s later projections. This visitor would appreciate the flashing innovations in the early single-channel video work Noisefields (1974) from the New York City years, when Steina and her husband Woody Vasulka cofounded The Kitchen (the experimental performance and electronic arts space), and would properly recognize the leap in scope and scale that the artist discovered when she moved to New Mexico in 1980 through the two-channel multi-monitor installation The West (1983).
It’s too late now, though, for me, and as I take in the show I bring along my newly ignited sense of late-twentieth-century sentimentality. I find the solid, square Sony televisions enclosing pieces such as Geomania (1986) comforting, the rolling media carts complete with thickly coiled headphone cords romantic, the buzzing distortions and geometric sequences audacious and ecstatic.
It is not my intention to reduce Steina—the artist or the show—to some sort of quaint throwback. Instead I’m attempting to elucidate my own stumbling epiphany, my understanding (appreciated in the nineties and aughts but lost somewhere along the AI-generated way) that a technologically mediated interpretation of the world needn’t be dystopian, that it could in fact be optimistic and curious and—in the hands of someone smart and intrepid and sensitive as Steina—a way of further entering our IRL world, rather than distancing oneself from it.
Steina’s touch is indeed everywhere in “Playback,” corralling the faceted frames and booming feedback and situating them in the neat confines of their substantial electronic containers. As if reaching into the screen with a pinch and twist to the center, Steina renders the world kaleidoscopic, and yet reassuringly recognizable. It is this physicality, so rare now in the age of the cloud, that makes this show about the often-ephemeral video artform so special, and is perhaps most evident in Borealis (1993). Here we have scale to thank, and sound, as the viewer is faced with four giant screens staggering back into the distance of a dark room, pulsing with the turbulence of Iceland’s surf and shore.
And it was there, just when I felt most diminished by the steady crush of the sea, when a body’s shadow—Steina’s?—entered the frame, ballooning me back up to my size and delivering me to my place as a person with agency among the daunting environmental and technological forces. I was reminded—through layers of salt and sand and media and machine—of the human touch.
1. Steina. (May 2000). Lava and Moss 2000: A projected video environment by Steina. Vasulka.org. Retreived from https://www.vasulka.org/Steina/Steina_LavaAndMoss/LavaAndMoss.html
“Steina: Playback” is on view in the Bakalar, Hayden, and References Galleries at MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, through January 12, 2025.
