The elemental throb of nature and the engineered pulse of electronic circuitry make for a potent combination in Steina’s current retrospective at SITE Santa Fe. Steina and her husband, Woody Vasulka, have lived in Santa Fe since 1980. Yet longtime viewers will see immediately that the style of low-end installation that they pioneered together (banks of old TV sets and military-industrial gadgets) is long gone. Glamorous new gear—Steina’s seminal work, The West, 1983, is shown here on a twenty-one-monitor LCD flat-screen ziggurat—makes the work appear newly sleek and sumptuous.

Six large-scale