Steina: Playback

When I became a musician, I was 10 years old.
I just went with my papa to see Beethoven’s Symphony Number Seven.

We will probably understand life and death
before we understand what music really is.

My background is in music.

For me, it is the sound that leads me into the image.
Every image has its own sound.
I do not think of images as stills, but always in motion.

As soon as I had a video camera in my hand,
as soon as I had that majestic flow of time in my control
I knew I had my medium.

Boy, was I glad to get rid of that violin.
It was like falling in love; I never looked back.

We had a Media God, and it was called:
                                                                       the Signal.
The audio could be video and the video could be audio.

It is in interactive real time
that I feel video becomes a category apart from the others —
                            film on one side
                                           and computer graphics on the other.

These were the radical times. We were all discovering this together. 
We erroneously thought that everybody conceived of video this way:
this time/energy construction.
                                         Now I realise we were very much alone.

I wanted to have moving images,
that were moved not by the musculature of the hands of an artist, 
but moved in some kind of mechanical way.
I was also after a vision that was not a human vision,
not something that we conventionally see.

Why repeat our normal, average vision?

My Machine Vision installations are performing systems,
they occur in the studio, out in the landscape, or in an exhibition.

The act of seeing, 
the image source and the kinetic resources
come from the installation itself, choreographed and programmed
by the cyclical nature of its mechanised performance.

When people look at Allvision,
they see themselves and, therefore, assume it is about them.
                                                              But then they leave and Allvision keeps going.

Landscape can never be ugly.
I moved in 1980 from Buffalo, New York 
because I wanted to experience what it is to live in the beauty.
For the first two years I resisted it.
First of all because the beauty of the West is so seductive.
And, secondly, I didn’t feel up to it.
                                                                                 I mean, are you going to take on God?

My video images primarily hinge upon
an undefined sense of time with no earth gravity.
It is like a duty to show what cannot be seen, except with the eye of media:
water flowing uphill or sideways,
upside down rolling seas, a weather beaten drop of a glacier melt.

My love affair with lava comes from early childhood,
when elves and trolls were still a part of reality.

I remember if I stared long enough at a lava field,
it started moving, even making sounds.
It is a great challenge to get landscape, frozen for centuries, to move,

yes dance.

There is just surrender: the way you listen to the wind.
The idea is that perhaps the audience could feel a part of this creative trance,
living for a moment in a mental world, where they have never been.

If I am very brutal and distasteful,
I would say it is a dialogue with God.
But I wouldn’t say that — it is too much.

Nobody has dialogues with God.

*The text is composed entirely in Steina's own words, drawn from interviews and statements across five decades.

Steina: Playback is the first major retrospective in Germany of the Icelandic pioneer of video and media art. Repetition, playback and the looped temporalities of the medium have long structured how Steina presents her work. At Haus der Kunst, the exhibition unfolds not as a chronology but as an orbit through the artist’s cosmos, tracing her invented tools, projected environments, and the long collaborations that have shaped her practice. Moving from voice to signal to system, Steina: Playback explores how sound, liveness, and technology shape perception. 

Steina: Playback is organised by MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and is co-curated by Natalie Bell, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Helga Christoffersen, Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Coordinating curators at Haus der Kunst are Lydia Antoniou and Marlene Mützel. 

For their annual support of the programme, we would like to thank our shareholders, the Free State of Bavaria, and the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Stiftung Haus der Kunst München e. V. Our special thanks go to our major supporter, the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, for its generous support of our work. We also thank the Ulli and Uwe Kai-Stiftung for its long-standing commitment. In addition, we thank the Beisheim Foundation for funding the “Third Place.”