B&W Vasulka project with a rotating camera, keyed and alternating directions. This experiment is excerpted in their 1977 work Orbital Obsessions.

This is a documentary about video artists Bill & Louise Etra, Woody & Steina Vasulka, and Kit Fitzgerald & John Sanborn.

The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.

Fellow violinist and artist Tony Conrad, in collaboration with software engineer Tom Demeyer, made for Steina the instrument seen in this title. Conrad and the Vasulkas all taught at the University at Buffalo in the Media Study Department from 1976 to 1979.

Documentation and experimentation in real time, "Orbital Obsessions" is an example of early video self-portraiture, eerie and calm in its radical implications for the medium. The Vasulkas were interested in the building of control systems for the manipulation of electronic signals, resulting in their collaborations with several designers and engineers. One such example was the Multi-Level Keyer, a tool designed in 1973 by George Brown at the request of the Vasulkas, who were interested in expanding their range of source imagery. Steina’s manipulation of the image through keying, layering, and the manual control of luminance is seen here.

Using one half of a convex mirror mounted within a glass cylinder, Steina trains the video camera eye dead center as she records the space immediately around her. “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 . . . an exercise in an immersive space” for both maker and viewer. —Yvonne Spielmann

Steina trained as a classical violinist, pushing her experience as a professional musician into the electronic realm with this seminal work. Originally performed in the late 1970s as a live recital with monitors, "Violin Power" began with the idea of generating a video image solely through the sound and movement of the bow. This signal switch, from audio to visual, grew in possibilities and variances as technology continued to expand in the ensuing decades. The most recent iteration of this performance involved Steina working with a MIDI violin and laptop.

Description from Portable Channel catalog: "This Program is a unique broadcast presentation of the Vasulka's recent experiments with the electronic image. It is not "video on TV" but a "videobroadcast" direct from the Vasulkas' loft in Buffalo, New York." The broadcast does in fact feature 3 Vasulka projects in their entirety: The Matter, Soundgated Images, and C-Trend.

A broadcast presentation of Steina and Woody Vasulka's experiments with the electronic image. Featuring a 15-minute "jam session" of improvised video feedback art.

The New Wave is the seminal compendium of independent video work in the early 1970s. Written and narrated by Brian O'Doherty, this overview of the emerging video field includes examples of guerrilla television and "street" documentaries, early explorations with image-processing and synthesis, and performance video. This historical anthology includes excerpts of tapes by the following video pioneers: Stephen Beck and Warner Jepson, Peter Campus, Douglas Davis, Ed Emshwiller, Bill Etra, Frank Gillette, Don Hallock, Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Paul Kos, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, Willard Rosenquist, Dan Sandin, James Seawright, Steina Vasulka, TVTV, Stan Vanderbeek and William Wegman.