Steina Vasulka – “Of The North” (Installation)
May 12, 2011 § Leave a comment
Created in 2001 and exhibited as an installation forming part of 2008’s Art Against Architecture at The National Gallery of Iceland, Of The North is pioneering experimental video artist Steina Vasulka’s projected video environment consisting of computer processed, spherical imagery. Vasulka’s orbs depict kinetic manipulations of Icelandic nature, from macro to micro, spinning in sound as if in a state of perpetual transmutation. This intense audio-visual experience draws from our relationship to the natural world and its processes and performs, in a sense, as abstract escapism through an unnatural vision.
“It is like a duty,” Vasulka says of her work, “to show what cannot be seen except with the eye of media: water flowing uphill or sideways, upside down rolling seas or a weather beaten drop of a glacier melt…perhaps the audience could feel a part of this creative trance, living for a moment in a mental world where they have never been.”
If some deities could form in representation of my Naturalistic Pantheist beliefs, this is how I imagine them to be: beautiful, obscure, spherical entities morphing in glorious AV for ever and ever (amen.)
Art Against Architecture exhibition, National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik, 2008.
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