LI-MA’s library brings together a growing collection of publications by artists, collaborators, and scholars working across media art and digital culture. Through this series, we occasionally highlight titles from the shelves that continue to inform, question, and expand these discussions. This time, we highlight Steina, a tome published by MIT Press and edited by curator Natalie Bell. The book accompanies the exhibition Steina: Playback, which Bell curated and which took place at MIT List Visual Arts Center and Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2024. Bell also co-curated the Reykjavík Art Museum retrospective running from 4 October to 11 November 2026.
Inside the book, writers like Gloria Sutton, Joey Heinen, and Ina Blom dig into Steina’s playful approach: how it morphed into new ways of processing and computation. They place her among fellow signal-obsessives, and make the case for her video work as an early experiment in virtual space. Right now, Steina’s work feels more urgent than ever.
Organised around five themes – system performance, tools, signals, machine vision and ecology – the book pairs plates with texts by Zach Ngin tracing Steina’s development as a maker. Alongside a conversation between Steina and the curatorial team, a roundtable of scholars and curators reflects on her shared legacy with Woody Vasulka. Gloria Sutton writes on the politics of Steina’s computational play, Joey Heinen on the Vasulkas’ tools and their pursuit of the signal, and Ina Blom on Steina’s construction of space in video. Heinen also joined LI-MA’s 2021 roundtable on Steina’s Violin Power (1970–1978), a work in our collection, where he asked whether its future lies in the performance, a representation of it, or a reinterpretation by another artist.
Steina (b. Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir, 1940, Iceland) has carved out a singular path – sometimes with her partner Woody Vasulka, often on her own – pushing optics and non-human perspectives into new territory. She started with violin and music theory in Reykjavík, then moved to the State Music Conservatory in Prague. Her journey zigzags from downtown New York and Buffalo to the landscapes of New Mexico, and eventually back to Iceland. Out in the field, Steina pairs imaging tech with reflective orbs, flipping our sense of where the body ends and nature begins, and opening up new ways to experience the world through media.
She landed in New York City in 1965. By the end of the decade, video had become her main language. In 1971, she cofounded The Electronic Kitchen (which soon became The Kitchen), a playground for experimental electronic media. Today, Vasulka Kitchen Brno takes its name from the Kitchen.
LI-MA is proud to be part of CUSP (Creative Understanding, Saving and Preserving Time-Based Media Art), a Creative Europe project that places special emphasis on the work of Steina and Woody Vasulka. Alongside the National Gallery of Iceland, the project brings together the National Museum of Norway, Vasulka Kitchen in the Czech Republic, Mystetskyi Art Arsenal in Ukraine, and partners like the Vasulka Foundation, University of Iceland, and Iceland University of the Arts.
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