Steina

B. 1940 in Reykjavik, Iceland. Lives in Santa Fe, US.

Studied violin and music theory.

Steina married Woody Vasulka, an engineer with a background in film in 1964. The same year she joined the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. They moved to New York in 1965 and she worked as a freelance musician. In New York they founded the Kitchen in 1971 together with Andreas Mannik, a performance space dedicated to new media. The Vasulkas has collaborated trough out the years, they began with a series of video works whose imagery arose primarily through the manipulation of the video signal at the level of the electron beam itself. Their curiosity took them right into technical development where they worked with for instance George Brown.

Although her main thrust is in creating videos and installations she is also involved in interactive performance in public places, playing a digitally adapted violin to move video images displayed on large video projectors. In 1996 Steina and Woody showed eight new media installations at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition repeated in Santa Fe a few months later. Her installation, titled Orka, was shown in the Icelandic Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Bienale.

/LARM

http://www.vasulka.org