Steina's First German Retrospective at Haus der Kunst Explores Video Art and AI

The Haus der Kunst in Munich is hosting "Playback," the first German retrospective of Icelandic video pioneer Steina (born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadóttir, 1940, Reykjavík). The exhibition, organized by the MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, showcases her groundbreaking work that anticipated the current era of AI-generated visuals. Steina's installations, such as "Matrix I" (1970–1972), "Violin Power" (1970–1978), and "Machine Vision" (1978), deconstruct the nature of electronic images, revealing them as time-based, electronic processes rather than mere representations. Her work with her husband, Slovak filmmaker Woody Vasulka, in the 1960s and 1970s in New York, including co-founding "The Kitchen" in the Mercer Arts Center, was pivotal in the experimental video art movement. After moving to Santa Fe in 1980, her art opened to landscapes, as seen in "The West" (1983), which combines images of the American Southwest with indigenous history and scientific technology. The exhibition also features "Borealis" (1993), an immersive installation exploring Icelandic geothermal phenomena, and "Outer Cosmos" (2026), a new collaborative work with Luca Ceccarelli that reuses material from her earlier "Orbital Obsessions" (1975–1977). Steina's work challenges viewers to question the machinery behind visual perception in the age of AI, asking where the cables, processors, and feedback loops are, and who defines the algorithms.