Robert Riley is director of the Richard L. Nelson Art Gallery and Fine Art Collection at UC Davis. Previously, Riley was media curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he produced numerous groundbreaking installation exhibitions.

The early seventies found Steina and Woody Vasulka building the “Vasulka Imaging System,” a personal video processing facility. To this day, they continue exploring the plasticity of the video medium using a wide array of customized tools, extraordinary output devices for rigorous visual research. This is key to the Vasulkas' art, because the “effects” identify the works as distinctly theirs. In Search of the Castle... (1981, 9:29 mins) serves as the perfect entry to their work. Here, the Vasulkas travel the Southwest in a visual journey that goes from unaltered naturalism to the wildly synthetic. Violin Power (1970–78, 10 mins, B&W) is a wondrous self-portrait by Steina in which the violin becomes a powerful image-generating instrument. Uncanny treatments of spatial and temporal perspectives, Steina's Summer Salt (1982, excerpt) baffles with its unexpected camera movements while Lilith (1987, 9:12 mins) is an eerie fusion of the human figure and the landscape. Woody Vasulka's Art of Memory (1987, 36 mins) studies the malleability and malfunctionings of recollection, a function both historical and personal. Vasulka's raw materials are documentary films, photographs, songs, and slogans from the twentieth century's great social upheavals. These “authentic” images are wrested from their frames and wrapped around three-dimensional objects. Thus we see a flawed mimetic process distorting the past as well as the veracity of the stored image.