Steina Explores a Nonhuman Perspective

It has become commonplace to imagine our world through the ‘eyes’ of machines – Google Street View, for example, enables this perspective by guiding users through visual landscapes made by cars with 360-degree cameras attached to their roofs. Steina, a pioneering media artist, anticipated the use of this technology more than 30 years prior to the release of the Google product with her film From Cheektowaga to Tonawanda (1975), which pans the landscapes of upstate New York with similar equipment to the cloud-based software: not to consolidate corporate control over emerging technologies but for artistic ends.

An image of Steina posing with the apparatus appears as a wall decal in ‘Playback’, a sprawling retrospective at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, previously on view at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. Works on view include Allvision (1976) – a closed-circuit environment featuring a mirrored orb, two Panasonic WV-240P cameras, a turntable and live footage of the scene streamed on dual monitors – and Orbital Obsessions (1975–77), which sees the artist adapting another dual camera set-up to record herself at work in her studio. Both pieces instantiate Steina’s first attempts to document electronic optics by manipulating the mechanical inputs/outputs of various media independent of earlier collaborations with her husband, Woody Vasulka, who died in 2019.

Her elaborate setups at times approximate Rube Goldberg machines, resulting in irregular or unpredictable visual feedback. In some works, Steina seems to employ the scientific method as she examines the limits of physics and the laws of cause and effect; in others, she approaches epistemological investigation, concerned with tracing the bounds of consciousness and identifying the distinction between nature and the man-made.

In the 1980s, Steina departed from the formalism that previously dominated her practice, adapting her tools to examine organic environments instead. The West (1983), a two-channel video installation with four audio streams, surveys the sky and terrain of the Reykjavík-born artist’s adopted home of New Mexico. But the work is hardly scenic, composed instead of lo-fi, glitchy images that are impeded by unexpected textures: static, visual snow and grain. As we reckon with the proliferation of artificial intelligence, Steina’s early experiments can perhaps help guide our engagement with these tools with a spirit of curiosity: viewers might consider the image ChatGPT has constructed of its users based on their data input in the same light that Steina considered the environment from the perspective of machines.

Though these works are rarely explicit about the artist’s political commitments, the materials she and Vasulka used in their collaborative and individual practices were adapted from Soviet military technologies. Allvision, for example, was informed by crude industrial automation configured via engineering and hydraulic mechanics, which Vasulka studied in his native Czech Republic, while the video installation Matrix I (1970–72) is constructed from cathode-ray tube monitors, also used for gathering intelligence in Cold War-era radars. These can now be understood as forerunners of the technologies that scaffold our current surveillance state.

Also on view is a trove of materials, drawn from both the artists’ and the museum’s archives, which illuminate the couple’s financial and professional preoccupations. A 2002 letter from ‘The Vasulkas, Inc.’ – penned by Steina – draws attention to the considerable economic struggle they experienced as artists and laments the lack of income generated by shows at museums.

With this in mind, it was hard not to be struck by the irony of recently laid-off union workers protesting outside the show’s opening, alleging union busting and retaliation by the museum. A more holistic, forward-thinking institution might have considered adopting a ‘labour vision’ alongside an exhibition championing that of machine – particularly in light of the livelihoods (and industries) imperilled by the latter’s growth.

Steina's ‘Playback’ is on view at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum until 30 June 2025, and will be on view at the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik and Reykjavik Art Museum from 5 October 2025 – 11 January 2026

^{Main image: ‬Steina,‬‭ Mynd‬‭, 2000, installation view. Courtesy: MIT List Visual Arts Center,‬‭ 2024; photograph: Dario Lasagni‬}