Steina

Summer Salt, 1982

In her description of the experiments, Marita Sturken stresses Steina’s systematic approach to reaching the limits of the physical. In self-reflexive ways the constraints of the electronic medium are exposed, mostly by rather violent, disorienting encounters between recording technology and the spatial environment. Here again, we find the notion of exhausting the medium with enhanced devices. Sturken says: "Each section of the videotape builds upon the previous one to create an increasingly multifaceted sense of spatial dimensions. In Sky High, (a) the camera is attached to the roof of a moving car with a mirrored lens that creates a 360-degree ‘distortion’ of the New Mexico sky, curved into a spherical merging of landscape and horizon. Low Ride  (b) takes the camera to the opposite extreme, with it strapped to the front bumper of the car as it drives through desert bush... In Somersault, (c) Steina playfully does gymnastics with her camera and its mirrored lens attachment as a means of producing a 360-degree image of a torso wrapped around the camera lens... Rest  (d) allows the camera to rest in a hammock, exhausted, in effect, from its physical exertions, as Steina digitally refigures the surrounding trees. Finally, in Photographic Memory, (e) seasonal landscapes are interwoven, shifted, and layered in sequences that insist on the tension between moving and still image." (1)

In the section Somersault, as Steina explains in the videotape The Making of Summer Salt (1982), (f) she added to her camera lens a glass tube containing a convex mirror, so that the camera perspective envelopes the surrounding space. She presents two ways of dissociating spatial recognition for the viewer: she jumps around in front of her camera embedded with the viewing prosthesis; or, she stands still, leaning against a tree, and moves the camera from side to side. In each, as the perspective is distorted, it is difficult for the viewer to decide what is mobile and what is stationary. In this regard, the exercise in mirrored, multiplied, and bent camera-views foregrounds experiments with treating single segments of the image differently, such as with parallel events (Orka and Warp) and metamorphosis (Lilith). At the same time, Summer Salt is an exercise in an immersive space that can both envelop the calculated presence of Steina herself (Somersault) and invite the random presence of viewers, who are also "enveloped" in the installation space.

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(1) Marita Sturken (ed.) "Summer Salt," in Steina and Woody Vasulka: Machine Media (San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986) p.29.