Steina

Seven Spheres

(work title)

In this video installation with multiple channels, Steina continues to explore the linking of video signals with software that processes electronic images. Steina has long been fascinated with a sphere's potential for producing complex optical environments (see the series Machine Vision). (1) Here, she begins a new phase by abandoning rectangular projection in favour of circular images and screens.

This project reinvestigates the formal procedures developed for Of the North (2001), a video projected onto the steel and glass periscope in the Place des Arts atrium (Montreal, Canada) during the Montréal en lumière Festival in 2001. In that work, Steina electronically manipulated images of Iceland to create fairly abstract patterns. Using Boris software, she shaped the video signal into a sphere that fit the presentation support perfectly. Seven Spheres pushes this experiment further. The video installation is part of a body of work (The West (1983), Voice Windows (1986), Orka (1997)) in which Steina probes the analogies between a landscape's abstract features and the formal characteristics of electronic images.

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(1) The Machine Vision (1975-) corpus was born out of research into perception begun by Steina in 1975 and pursued ever since.