Stealing Fire from the Gods: Merging Image and Sound in the Work of Steina Vasulka BY FRANCESCA ASTESANI We are not used to thinking of fire as technology, though learning how to manage fire was one of the most important technological advancements in human development. Referring to another world-changing technological advancement—that of video—and the experiments that she and her husband Woody have carried out with the medium since the mid-sixties, Steina Vasulka is reported enthusiastically saying: “Each time we believed we were stealing fire from the gods.”1 Steina and Woody Vasulka have been working side by side for over five decades: moving to New York in 1965, they quickly discovered the moving image as a new open field of image-making, inscribing their work into the early history of video art. The relatively untouched territory of the new medium allowed the two artists to approach their electronic image experiments with great freedom and playfulness, qualities that often transpire from their works. This spirit of freedom and curiosity, which they never abandoned throughout their long artistic journey, also marked their founding of The Kitchen, an institution that is still an important space for multidisciplinary and experimental artistic practices in New York City today. As opposed to the optical nature of film and photography, video offered infinite possibilities to create images from electrical impulses, manipulating a visual world according to the medium’s internal logic, through
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imageries that could 1. S teina’s quotes are extracted from Marco transcend the pheMaria Gazzano’s text in the catalogue: M. M. nomenological expeGazzano (ed.), Steina rience of space and and Woody Vasulka, video, media e nuove time. Hence Steina’s immagini nell’arte contemporanea. Milan: humourous notion Fahrenheit 451, 1995. of stealing the ‘godly’ prerogative of creation: “For the first time, we could see images which were not of this world, which came from somewhere else. The next step was when we discovered that the images and the sounds came from the same source: that images were formed by voltage and frequencies, and so were sounds.” In video, image and sound are both created by electrical signals and this connection has always been particularly important for Steina, who was educated as a classical violinist. In a conversation I had with her recently, she pointed out that images are, for her, always moving: a time-based media just like music. Since the beginning of the 1970s, she has been experimenting with the musicsound interface. In the piece Violin Power (1970-78), for instance, the sound input from her violin distorts the video recording of her playing the instrument, creating a new interface where image and sound are merged, or even better, where sound actually generates a new type of image.
