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The sun is down and the glow of the computer is up for me to interview two legendary electronic artists via Skype. For 20 years, I've heard about them and read about them, but I've almost never been able to find their works—until I walked down the hill the other day and discovered a whole miraculous handful on temporary view at Cornish College of the Arts. I'm nervous. Steina arrives first. She goes by that single name, pronounced stay-na, and she's wearing an industrial yellow work jacket with metal-rimmed glasses on her round face, which is ringed by an echoing round of floppy, tomboyish hair, white. She sits at a cluttered desk with electronic equipment on a shelf at her right and black wires running up behind her head. Her lips and the edges of her eyes angle frownfully downward, but her demeanor is of someone waiting to play, biding her time until something sufficiently amusing comes along. Her husband of 50 years, Woody Vasulka, takes the chair an hour later. He's got a black fisherman's cap on and a thick white beard fragment jutting off his chin. It's like a tail for his face.

They're both approaching 80 years old, and the interview lasts almost two hours. It is both simple and cryptic, full of circular stories and technical glitches possibly involving fingers being passed over microphones, creating fuzzy gaps in thoughts that are already sometimes a little kooky…

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