Chapter 11

Bill Viola: A Close Re-View of Reality

Beyond the Frame of the Screen

Viola has said that he began to experiment in these media because he wanted to get out of the studio. He happened to be at the right time at the right place: Syracuse University, where Viola studied, enjoyed an active video environment at the time. The Everson Museum of Art was just organizing its first video exhibitions, which culminated in the Nam June Paik retrospective in 1973. Viola himself became involved in setting up the university’s first cable TV network, where he had his training as a studio engineer and became a member of the Synapse Video Group. Upon his return from Florence, Italy, where he worked as technical director at Art/Tapes/22, one of the first experimental video studios in Europe, from 1974 to 1976, he obtained the first artist-in-residency at WNET-TV’s Television Laboratory / Channel 13, in New York (1976-1983). This enabled him to explore and work with the sophisticated computer editing system there. His early works in video, like those of most video artists, basically were an exploration of the technical features of the medium, such as real time, feedback, closed-circuit, as well as synthesized imagery. The importance of video for him was its possibility to view at once what one had recorded a few seconds before, making an instantaneous reaction possible to the experience just before.

Viola also claims to have been influenced more by experimental filmmakers of the time - such as Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas - than by the contemporary videomakers. The work of experimental filmmakers, like Michael Snow, focused, among other things, on how structural devices could influence or even determine perceptual qualities. And like Brakhage, Viola rarely used spoken language, and the few times when this happened the words were “just ... part of the sound landscape.”[332] Nam June Paik had expressed himself quite simply - “film is chemicals, TV is electronics. There are something like four million phosphor dots on a twenty-one-inch television screen every second; it is just like Seurat - you mix them in your eye. In film, you take from reality; in TV, you produce reality - real electronic color.” But Bill Viola’s early concerns were truly in trying to define technical and aesthetic qualities inherent in the medium. Just as the experimental filmmakers were exploring the material film some decade earlier, Viola began experimenting with the materiality of video, investigating the nature of the electronic moving image, and especially the component of time.[333] To the French theorist/critic Raymond Bellour he said: “The crucial thing for me was the process of going through an electronic system, working with these standard kind of circuits which became a perfect introduction to a general electronic theory. It gave me a sense that the electronic signal was a material that could be worked with. This was another really important realization. ... I never thought about (video) in terms of images so much as an electronic process, a signal.”[334]

He never cared much for the idea of a ‘guerrilla television’ which saw its heyday in the early seventies, with numerous community-oriented groups like Videofreex, Global Village, Raindance Corporation, etc. searching to influence the commercial network structure with alternative television. This did not mean that he did not deal with television. However, in contrast to Paik’s overkill strategy, Viola preferred to deviate strongly from the formal structures and editing concepts that have become television’s mode and next to the former one’s videotapes, the latter one’s even look sparse, with their often slow-paced editing sequences, seemingly devoid of technical effects. Seemingly, because - like Paik - from the start Viola has sought to use state-of-the-art technology. After he was offered an artist-in-residency at the Television Laboratory of WNET-TV, Viola has always produced broadcast quality videotapes, having in mind that they would be broad- or cablecast. And most of them were. Television is the country’s most powerful news medium, and extremely influential. For Viola’s generation, television functions as society’s conscious reflection and moral self-image, and he has always been convinced that artists should be using this medium, because video, “when coupled with the human mind can offer us sight beyond the range of our everyday consciousness, but only if it is our desire, both as viewers and as creators to want to do so.”[335]

Viola was also concerned about the ‘narrow’ territory of the visual arts and looked at what was going on in other fields, including psychology, anthropology, cybernetics, philosophy, history and so on, to connect video’s internal communication aspects with a much broader interdisciplinary field of communication. And like other media-conscious artists, he was well-informed about the intellectual ideas of Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller or Norbert Wiener. Viola: “To see art as part of this larger context is to realize it is only a small part of a larger picture. The first time I went out there was very important in that it broke down the boundaries of thoughts that held me within the art world itself. It’s like a figure/ground reversal. I saw the art world as this little category that we’ve made a space for in the larger cultural structures we’ve created.”[336] Being involved with television’s modes of communication constituted one possibility transcending the “boundaries of the art world” - as a medium that, both technically and structurally, asked for a viewpoint that would take into account the broader social, political, and cultural implications; as a means to be used as a cultural strategy. Subsequently, Viola began to ask himself questions about other qualities of the moving image: the nature of human perception and our capacity to memorize things. How do we retain images, for example? Why do we remember certain occurrences in our lives, and forget others? How does this influence our understanding of history, and time? His wide-ranging studies in the scientific topics of the day, in ‘foreign’ cultures, in the literary and philosophical history of the West and the East to find cross-cultural relationships, served to acquire the background knowledge for a more specific research into the nature of memory and perception. Bill Viola’s interest in memory, and time, have led him to research the functioning of the brain, i.e. the functioning of our mental faculties. He familiarized himself with the developments in artifical intelligence research as well as the latest ideas in neurophysiology and neural networks.

Since the sixties there has been a continuous research in man - machine (i.e. computer) relationships, and investigations into the possibilities of providing computers with learning capabilities. Whether the computer will or even can take on the same function as the human brain is not that important here. What concerns Viola is that the digital and electronic technologies are representative of the current scientific way of thinking. This is a major reason for him to use video as a tool, for he considers it representative of the state-of-the-art ‘system of logic’ or ‘philosophy.’ Viola: “Consciously or unconsciously, most people assume the existence of some sort of space when discussing mental functioning. ... This mental space is directly analogous to the “data space” in our first brainchild, the computer, being the field in which calculations occur and where virtual objects of digital graphics are created, manipulated and destroyed. Like a fundamental ontology, this given space is perceptually before or after what is done, an a priori existence from birth in the flip of a switch until the lights finally go out.”[337]

Time-Space Continuum

It goes without saying that the element of time in video as an inherent technical quality was of great significance as a formal device, which was yet enhanced by the introduction of the computer, enabling time-code video-frame editing (ca. 1973/4). The new digital editing facilities, to which Viola had access since 1976, replaced the real-time, linear representational composition and made it possible to compose the images in any time structure desired. For example, in The Reflecting Pool the frame is broken up into three distinct levels of time: real-time, still, and time-lapse. Time is constructed to look like a complete image of a single space. Viola refers to it as sculpting with time. The Reflecting Pool are five independent works that function like a cycle, evoking birth, growth, death, rebirth. They are: The Reflecting Pool, Moonblood, Silent Life, Ancient of Days, and Vegetable Memory. Internally, the works also contain cyclic or rhythmic layerings, such as the human life cycle, natural cycles, the daily cycle, moving from day to night to day. Thus The Reflecting Pool (1977-1979), deals with the fact that all life on earth is subject to the same processes, whether perceived as linear, cyclic, or concentric. In Ancient of Days (1979-1981) time as duration is the major structuring device. Using effects like slow motion, reverse motion and time-lapse, Viola appears to want to make time a tactile experience. Ancient of Days (1979-1981) was described by Viola: “Diverse rhythms of natural and subjective time are interwoven into a complex whole using a mathematical notation of time code editing. Notions of temporal symmetry and duration transposing are explored, along with extensions of video time-lapse techniques. ... The piece is the result of research conducted on the computer editing system at the Sony Corporation, in Japan.”[338]

For Viola, investigation into natural phenomena, i.e. the levels of existence as being mineral, vegetable, plant, animal, man, etc. are always related to how we as human beings perceive them. Few people realize that we experience something differently each time we view something, so that in fact we partially recreate the mental image of our own environment continually, both physically and mentally. Vegetable Memory, which title is derived from the writings of Jalaludin Rumi, a Persian poet of the 13th century who moved Viola deeply, explores the perceptual effect of repetitive cyclic viewing. A cycle of images - recordings from the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo - is repeated at different speeds, so that the images appear extended in time, and because of that appear changed in form, more pictorial. Images of fish, dying, cut, dead, in buckets, frozen, handled by hands of fishermen, do not just remain images. This non-narrative technique affects the viewer’s perception in that it offers options for personal associations and subjective meaning apart from the known symbols and metaphors they refer to, bringing back memories and creating new ones. In addition, the place being the fishmarket, its surroundings and the activities there make us part of an expanded context, the reality of a social and economic situation. Viola: “The idea of vegetable memory is going from one level down to the next one, in the sense that there are these images of fish which have been taken out of where they are and what they are (the water), and brought to the next level (the land), which for them is death. Land is death for the fish in the same sense that for us there is another world above the surface. ... It’s the idea of death in the positive sense, in a sense of growth and not in a negative sense.” It is a recurrent metaphor in the artist’s videotapes.[339] Finally, said Viola, the series is also a metaphor for a personal journey of the artist. The works, as it were, attempt to connect the manifold layers of time as they unfold in the different time sequences and the workings of electronic videotape, to understand time cyclically by viewing (playing and rewinding the videotape). The viewing experience is after all also a mode which is literally cyclical.

Levels of Perception

Although it is possible to create these effects artificially with the current state-of-the-art technology, Viola has emphasized that it was important to him that the viewer realize that these images are natural or ‘real,’ yet that they force the viewer to raise questions as to how we decide what is real and what could be a hallucination, and ultimately what is really the nature of perception. When he studied experimental psychology, for example, to learn about the workings of the central nervous system, and about how the eye works, he found that the whole human system is geared toward the perception of change, i.e. that we see because of changes happening and that this is also why we perceive time.

The sounds in Chott el-Djerid are natural ambient sounds from the site itself. His background in music has been of major influence on the way he uses sound in his visual works. Thus he compares the characteristics of sound and acoustics, and in particular electronic sound with the electronic image, positing the idea of a sound field, which is defined as a field that is always present. It is a concept that comes from the Hindu philosophical notion which sees the origin of all things in sound, as represented by the essential vibration Om. Being a field there is no central viewpoint. This is also a characteristic of the electronic image. Viola: “In technology, the current shift from analog’s sequential waves to digital’s recombinant codes further accelerates the diffusion of the point of view. Like the transformation of matter, there is a movement from the solid and liquid states into the gaseous. There is less coherency, but previously solid barriers become porous, and the perspective is that of the whole space, the point of view of the air.”[342] Interestingly, Woody Vasulka, also a video artist of the first hour, said something to that extent: “There is a certain behavior of the electronic image that is unique... It’s liquid, it’s shapeable, it’s clay, it’s an art material. It exists independently. ... The electromagnetic spectrum exists, organized and unorganized totally in space.”[343] I already mentioned before that Robert Smithson created a few sculptural works in which he dealt with elements of obsoleteness of the Renaissance perspective as well. Smithson’s thought evolved from his research into crystalline structures, Viola’s is based on physical properties of electronic technologies.

Both Nam June Paik and Bill Viola understood early on that there was a congruence between the development of the communication and information theories and the ‘evolution’ of electronic technology, after the discovery of electromagnetism by James Clerk Maxwell. Viola has mentioned how the understanding of certain principles, like basic wave theory, amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, carrier wave, how light behaves, etc., were important to him as basic principles from which electronic communications theory could evolve in the first place. The electronic image, television, is based on the same technology (general wave theory), and subsequently made the development of the digital image possible. Thus, while the discoveries in the science of physics had required scientists to perceive time and space as correlates, the new technologies are in fact an application of this new way of thinking. Viola: “The video image is a standing wave pattern of electrical energy, a vibrating system composed of specific frequencies as one would expect to find in any resonating object. As has been described many times, the image we see on the surface of the cathode ray tube is the trace of a single moving focused point of light from a stream of electrons striking the screen from behind, causing the phosphor coated surface to glow. In video, a still image does not exist, in fact at any given moment an image does not exist at all. In terms of energy, the beam is always activated and in motion, and there is always a steady stream of electrical impulses coming from the camera or video recorder driving it. The divisions into lines and frames are solely divisions in time, opening and closing temporal windows that demarcate periods of activity within the steady stream of electrons. Thus, the video image is a living dynamic energy system, a vibration appearing solid only because it exceeds our ability to discern such fine slices of time.”[344] In short, the electronically created image has no single point of focus, nor is there any perception of depth possible. The television screen presents an overall flat image. This perceptual synaesthesia, this cross-over and interchangeability between the visual and aural senses is seen by Viola as a natural inclination of the structure of all contemporary electronic media.

I should interject at this point that Bill Viola always uses state-of-the-art technology even if it is not apparent. His continuous research into new developments is just as much a part of his life as is sleeping. Yet he does not perceive his work solely within the context of art, but the broader cultural tradition of anthropology. Marie Luise Syring recently even called his style “visionary documentary.”[345] For example, Hatsu Yume (First Dream) could have been just a straight sequence of images presenting aspects from Japan’s natural environment and city life, had it not been for the way in which Viola records his images: the variations in the length of the shots, his mode of timing, the moving up or slowing down the speed of recording, the special way in which he edits his sequences. The tape opens with a sunrise over the ocean and the shoreline, moves to Mt. Fuji, bamboo groves, rice fields, and a hot spring at a mountain shrine, a boulder with small rocks - obviously places with special meaning for the Japanese - to Tokyo’s fish market at dawn, a tour through the city at night filmed from a car, and closes with images from fishing boats at night. Without narrative and only using ambient sound, the images receive new meaning, beyond the representational. “First Dream is probably the least literal of all tapes I’ve done. It’s about birth and death, starting with light and ending with light... What we’re really talking about is images as symbols,” said Viola. “Video treats light like water - it becomes a fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish - Darkness is the death of man.”[346] While in Japan, he and his wife, Kira Perov, lived in a small studio apartment in Tokyo, studying Japanese traditions, like Noh theater, Zazen meditation techniques, learning calligraphy, even the language, in order to understand the culture, albeit from a western vantage point. Hatsu Yume transfers the images that have a specific symbolic meaning in Japanese culture onto a general level, where they provide the Western viewer with some intuitive insight into this culture. Viola chose those images from the natural environment that he thinks still have a symbolic meaning for us as well: mountain, rock, fish, water, light. “The mountain is a traditional symbol for time, eternity, stillness, and I’ve used it with those meanings in mind, although it’s not only that. That rock is time, really: representing rock in slow motion, images moving 16 times normal speed, it slows up to real time and then to slow motion. It’s like windows or wavelengths of perception. There are all these different rates of perception that are simultaneous and interwoven at any one moment, but we are tuned only to a certain bandwidth or range. ... It’s directly related to scale changes in space or even music.”

Hatsu Yume was made during a one year residency in Japan on a Japan-United States Creative Arts Fellowship, which was extended by half a year as artist-in-residence (1980) at Sony Corporation’s Atsugi Plant. Sony Corporation allowed him to use their latest high-resolution camera, particularly suitable for low light conditions, a feature that Viola has thoroughly exploited in this videotape. He learned from and worked with the engineers who had designed the new 1 inch computer editing system at the Atsugi Plant. In addition, he developed a special zoom lens motor control with Japanese engineer Yasio Shinohara.

The formal aspects - long shots, alternated with close-ups, the use of slow motion or the opposite - all have strong observational qualities, of course, related to the time-space continuum. Together they are used structurally so that the image becomes a sign for something else. It makes an image or sign transcend into a symbol or metaphor; even gives the suggestion of another kind of reality existing beyond the purely visual. The creation of a time-space continuum is particularly apparent in Anthem (1983), a videotape in which the single scream of a child recorded in Union Station, Los Angeles, is elongated in time over the entire tape of eleven and one-half minutes, unifying the diverse kinds of images, related to heavy industry and medicinal technology and daily life habits. In He Weeps for You (1976) a drop of water slowly came out of a copper pipe. A color camera with a special lens recorded this process, which was projected on a large screen at a rear wall. In the drop of water the surrounding space was mirrored, including the observer. Time appeared extended. As the artist explained: “The piece makes reference to the traditional philosophy or belief that everything on the higher order of existence reflects, and is contained in, the manifestation and operation of the lower orders. This idea has been expressed in ancient religious terms as the symbolic correspondence of the mundane (the earth) and the divine (the heavens), and is also represented in theories of contemporary physics which describe how each particle of matter in space contains knowledge or information about the entire system.”[347]

The Theater of Memory (1985), an installation first exhibited at the 1985 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, further explored the different levels of perception as related to memory and the working of the central nervous system. A large dead tree diagonally cut through the dark room, with fifty-odd lanterns hanging from its branches. The little lanterns were programmed to flicker in unison, as if short-circuited. On the back wall, behind the tree, visible though the branches the spectator saw video images projected on the rear wall. The pictures were distorted and not recognizable, accompanied by loud static noise and sound, alternated with periods of silence. A concealed fan blew a soft wind on the tree. The installation was representative of how the artist uses memory as a function of the brain, to create a work in which he has brought images ‘retrieved’ from his own memory, i.e. experiences, (pre-)recorded electronic images, together with natural elements - here a dead tree which has gone through its own cycle of existence. This superposition of elements creates a perceptual experience that moves in different directions. Viola: “I remember reading about the brain and the central nervous system, trying to understand what causes the triggering of nerve firings that recreate patterns of past sensations, finally evoking memory. I came across the fact that all of the neurons in the brain are physically disconnected from each other, beginning and ending in a tiny gap of empty space. The flickering pattern evoked by the tiny sparks of thought bridging these gaps becomes the actual form and substance of our ideas. All of our thoughts have at their center this small point of nothingness.”[348] Recently I was re-reading chapters of Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and came across a paragraph in which - reflecting on the impermanence of existence - he thinks of a tree: “When you think of a tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level, like a wave, it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see that ultimately it has no independent existence. When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that stretches across the universe.”[349] Maybe these are only my own associations. However, thoughts about the absence of an independent existence of all things on earth, called “emptiness” in Buddhist terms, seems to be a central element in Viola’s oeuvre.

The Nature of Existence

Il Corpo Scuro (The Dark Body) explores the interior of a stalactite cave, before the camera moves to the vast lonely pastures of the North American bison. Both represent something of the primordial in the earthly cycles, which is brought to the fore by the long close-up shots of a dripping stalactite, of a bison’s eye, of flies swarming the carcass of a dead bison. The Language of Birds connects in a sequel of animal portraits the eye (camera) of the artist with that of the animals, an address as well as an encounter. It links the artist’s vision of the mind’s eye, in both man and animal. The Night of Sense brings the viewer into the realm of human consciousness: we see a man (Viola himself) reading, studying, taking notes, eating a solitary fish dinner, interrupted by ‘visions,’ - moments of inspiration ? - moments of reconnaissance - memories? Stunned by the Drum tests the limitations of the eye - once again - while an intense sound of drums makes the ‘eye’ go wild in a euphoric trancelike state. This part, as it were, forms the introduction to the fifth part, The Living Flame, which takes the viewer to a documentation of Hindu fire worship, with trancelike painless dances over burning coals, and ears, noses, skins pierced with needles, accompanied by the intense sound of the drum. Yet another level of consciousness is displayed. The closing image returns to the lake where the tape began; the viewer flies in an airplane over the water with a dead fish in front of his eyes, ending with its decomposition on the shore. [352]

Over the years Viola has developed a vocabulary of images which keep recurring in different combinations with different meanings. The fish is a symbol of Christ in the Judeae-Christian religion, for the Japanese is is their main source of protein, apart from mythic connotations. In many other cultures it is more than a daily kind of nutrition. Fire and water are often used in initiation and purification rites and rituals. Light, natural or man-made, is a recurring structural as well as symbolic element. Light literally makes us see, but metaphorically means, among other things, vision, or understanding.

These are elements of the earth which have symbolic meaning in almost all cultures. Although the meaning of many Christian symbols has been lost and the same fate threatens rituals and belief systems of many of the so-called ‘primitive cultures,’ of which the continuity of traditional values is based on oral transmission, for Viola there are also elements which have “a natural level of meaning,” implicit in themselves, and not dependent on any culturally understood interpretation. They have “a power which you sense, even if you don’t know the precise meaning,” he says. He calls it “the power within.” A powerful example for him is the mountain, representing time itself. “The fact that we are bound together in nature, that there are certain processes happening in nature, ourselves, our bodies, our minds are part of that nature and that is the reason there are analogies happening continuously.”[353]

Mind - Body Continuum

Bill Viola’s work of the nineties maintains this layering and complexity of issues concerning the human experience. Yet birth and death - the two ultimate experiences in every person’s life - have obtained a more dominant role. Formally it consists predominantly of video instal-lations that include the spatial surroundings. There is a return, it would seem, to the single image, using again the monitoring quality of video. The aspect of time literally and metaphorically passing is at the center. The spectator becomes - sometimes painfully - aware of this as he or she passes through a semi-dark room or corridor, when the eyes need time to adjust in order to see.

The Nantes Triptych (1992) follows the medieval and renaissance system of the three-panel altarpiece. The left ‘wing’ shows the image of a woman giving birth, the right ‘wing’ of a woman dying. The central part shows a figure moving under water, symbolic for the transitional period immediately after death - already unreachable for us, yet still present? It is a continuous loop without editing. The viewer almost becomes a voyeur present at different stages in the journey of human life, which is also his own: it is the human condition portrayed. The references to the Christian triptych are intentional, yet they do not make the installation an altarpiece. Although in Christian iconography such altarpieces generally portray scenes from the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, the Nantes Triptych does not carry this highly symbolic weight. It seems a reference to a medieval system of perception, in which religion, art and science were still more or less considered to exist on one plane; to a concept of nature which did not make a divison between life and death as we do. At least, this is how these ages now appear to us; ‘holistic.’ And this vision includes the mind in the physical reality itself.

Pneuma (1994) is a room installation in which the unity of life is fully spun out. Pneuma means breath, but also life and soul (Artistotle). Viola: “There is such a deep connection between seeing and knowing that it is odd to think how the two could have been considered separate. There has been much discussion about the result of the famous dualism of Descartes and it is obvious that today we do view body and mind as separate from each other, and we consider the intellect, senses, emotions and so on as separate parts of the mind. If we take a broader view of world culture, past and present, surveying the most advanced and sophisticated to the more fundamental and tribal it becomes apparent that the present division that we in the industrialized West have developed is a kind of distortion.”[354] So in Viola’s vision the five senses are not individual things but integrated with the mind; they form a total system and create this field, an experiential field which is the basis of conscious awareness.

In the five rooms of “Buried Secrets,” made for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 1994, the observer is acutely made aware of this. Hall of Whispers, Interval, Presence, The Veiling, and The Greeting challenge all levels of human perception. In Hall of Whispers images of ten people’s heads with mouths tightly gagged are projected on the walls of a narrow and dark corridor. They try to speak but their voices sound muffled because the “gags prevent their words from being understood.” The second room, Interval, consists of two wall size projections. On one side a man slowly washes himself scrutinously - “peaceful, calm, still” - on the other are rapidly cut images showing fire and water with a figure trying to get through and scenes of bodily fluids and orifices - “chaotic, violent, intense.” Not only are we bombarded with aggression and violence day by day, from which we have to withdraw purposively, but both aspects are within us, constantly fighting. Sound, as sculptural form, is dominant in Presence. In this room the observer can only sense bodily presence through the whispering voices of both young and old people, “audible when (the) listener steps into (the) sound beam.”[355] In The Veiling two projectors on opposite sides of the space project images through a series of veils hanging loosely in the room. The images are of a man and a woman nearing each other in nocturnal landscapes, crossing and moving away from each other again. The images change in clarity as they penetrate more deeply into the layer of scrims, literally become veiled. The bodies diffuse, almost disappear. Marilyn Zeitlin suggests “awareness of one’s own body, of surroundings, of the narrative-line of someone else’s life crossing one’s own ... the multiple layers of cloth and image call up this capacity of the mind to work on all these levels at once.”[356] This probably applies even more to The Greeting, which records a meeting and exchange of greetings between three women. The motive is based on Jacopo Pontormo’s Visitation in the church of Carmignano near Florence. Because the episode was recorded on high-speed 35mm film, the original length was stretched twelve times. Every detail of the interchange, from the tiniest movements and gestures to the facial expressions and events in the background, therefore has equal emphasis and becomes meaningful. Yet, what is said or whispered between these women? Speech and body language are our normal human ways to communicate. They take time, literally. Communication - or rather the disability to communicate because of different obstacles, willingly or non-willingly - appears a central connecting element in these installations. Even though the viewer/listener moves through a spatial setting, the imprint of time becomes stronger than that of space. Yet many questions in this work remain unanswered - ‘Buried Secrets’?

The artist acknowledges his prevailing interest in systems which deal with interrelationships between different phenomena on earth, whether on a physical or cultural, on a religious, or philosophical level. And the studies in science, religion and philosophy are no less than an attempt to bring the artist’s whole field of vision together in a “total system of perception and cognition at work.” We have seen that the artist’s interdisciplinary research is reflected in the complex layering of a densely composed audio-visual structure, comprising among other research: - 1. research into questions of audio and visual perception, as related to the functioning of the brain, neural processing, and problems of cognition, consciousness, memory. - 2. into concepts of time and space, as related to those in the new physics as well as the electronic and digital computer technologies; - 3. into the life cycles of nature, like birth, growth, death, regeneration, as related to an underlying spiritual order in which the human body and mind are a whole.

However, Bill Viola keeps developing his work as a journey involving his own personal rhythm of life, in a close encounter with the technological progress of the medium. He chose the context of art, and one may ask how far the boundaries of art have been expanded by his vision, or in how far he contributed to a change in the definition of art. Viola’s videotapes are made for the public realm of television, his video installations are generally shown in the museum / art context. Video technology represents for Viola the only means relevant today to express these all-encompassing concerns, because according to him its principles of communication dominate the current information networks world-wide.