Borealis

1993, Steina

In preservation at

Myndbandsverk upphaflega sett upp í Listasafni Íslands, 1993 BOREALIS 1993 A PROJECTED VIDEO ENVIRONMENT BY STEINA Steina’s means are simple. She takes stunningly beautiful yet turbulent clips of nature in her native Iceland, enlarges them, then turns them on end, literally and figuratively, so that they may be experienced as living abstractions on a scale equal to that of the human body. The effect is to tear them from their entrenchment in the cliché so they may be perceived free from the drag of representational history. Nature, having somehow survived the twentieth century onslaught of archaic industrial insults, speaks in the only way it can, through stormy electronic images by an artist with roots both in urban culture and in a remote land still precariously preserved in ice. — LANE BARDEN D E S C R I P T I O N BOREALIS is a projected video environment with two video and four audio channels of presentation. The projectors, laid on their sides, provide an upright ratio for large projection screens, hung vertically in the exhibit space. Half-transparent mirrors, are placed in the projection pathway splitting and directing the image onto two additional screens, now four in total. The screens are made of translucent material that shows images with equal intensity on both surfaces, front and rear. The result is eight vertically viewed large images, placed in an irregular pattern, which harmonizes with the exhibition space. The program comes in the form of a ten-minute repeating loop. Each of the two video laser disc players provides one video and two audio sources to the two projectors and four speakers. At the end of each cycle, a laser disk synchronizer aligns the two video players for a repeat performance.

Main information

Title

Art title: Borealis English art title: Borealis

Dating

1993

Object-related numbers

Museumnumber a: LÍ-8069

Dimensions

Tímalengd: 00:10:28

Record type

Art

Collection

Undirskrá: Aðalskrá

Classification

Nýir miðlar, Innsetningar

References

http://www.vasulka.org/Steina/Steina_Borealis/Borealis.html (aðgengilegt 22.10 2020) Þórunn Þórsdóttir, "Frumkraftar", Morgunblaðið, 8.05.1993, blað B, bls. 1-2.