CS: You very often use the term “video environment” to describe the setting of your work. What is wrong with the term “installation”.
SV: Yes, it is really interesting because this term “environment” was not really used in the early seventies. First and foremost we felt that what we were doing was building environments and when the term installation became so prevelant, we kind of didn’t like it. It reminded me too much of plumbing … the plumbing installation in your house… But anyhow installation, especially as it is used now for everybody, does not really work anymore. I feel the term environment much more appropriate, because unlike a sculpture, which usually stands alone or you make a few sculptures which are related to eachother, this idea of immersing the visitor that is the basic idea, to immerse him in sound and image.

CS: Allow me to ask a general question. What is from you point of view the importance of new media technologies in the arts today?
SV: Well, I think we somehow out of sync with ourselves. I don’t know how to explain it but when we started with new media in the 1970s there were so many good artists. But most of them have disappeared, but they made interesting works … much more interesting than the decade after. And this when we met them all like Nam June Paik or Bill Viola and Gary Hill. We found this universe very crowded with great thinkers and people who are going to go far and wide … but that hasn’t happened. There is a lot of mediocrity in video that has then carried over to computer.

CS: You are not that often exhibiting in galleries. But this fall you will have a show in October gallery in London
SV: Yes, friends of ours invited us last year to October gallery to have little impromptu show and they have this gorgeous room on the top floor that was kind of a church or library for rich persons. And they offered that space and the place downstairs to us which is the real gallery. So, we are going to present some video environments to create an immersive space there. But it is really a new thing for me because, as I said earlier, I never had much to do with galleries before. I come from the mediaworld, not from the artworld, and they are very different and they almost don’t cross.

Reykjavík, 16.8.2005 - Part I was published in LIST #4

CS: Since the late 1960s you work with video. How did it come that a musician started to work with video?
SV: It is very interesting: I was very tired of music. I was stuck in New York as a freelancer. I didn’t like it anymore. It is not an interesting world to be in, to gigging around and the money isn’t good. So I realized I was stuck. It started with Woody who was coming home with recordings like the one that was very important for me - what I didn’t realized at that time (and this is actually the first time I talk about it). On New Year’s eve he brought home a video footage he shot at Filmore East of Jimmy Hendrix. Everybody who was watching it was excited. And a few days later there was just a steady stream of people who came to hear the Hendrix recording because the official record came out like six months later. There was a song that was called “The Machinegun” that everyone wanted to hear. And the more I heard that song, the more I realized that this guy Jimmy Hendrix was a kind of incredible genius. And from that moment on I wanted to do that: I wanted to take pictures of my surroundings, because it was so dense at that time. So I actually kind of consider my entry into video New Year’s eve of 1969.

CS: And how about a technical approach?
SV: We were very interested in feedback and watch these electronic phenomena of that medium. Our interest split very early into two directions: one was this kind of a documentation, which was not a real documentation, it was just taping. And the other was synthetic videos, we called it. And to that extend we started integrating instruments, making tools or modifying what was available, because it could never do exactly what we wanted. Part of it was also working with oscillators – that is where I am linked to Finnbogi Pétursson.