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September 21, 2006
Bill Viola
I'd like to see some of Viola's work, because just from reading these notes its difficult to get an idea of what his work is about.
He seems to get very excited about things which would strike most people as mundane, quotidian events. I am thinking of his description of playing with a magnifying glass and when he gets excited about the reflections on his glasses on a rainy night in New York. Frankly, these epiphanies strike me as fairly silly. Did he mean for these notes to be published, or were these things he wrote down in a private journal? I mean if I started telling someone about how I got excited about the reflections raindrops make on my glasses, and just had to rush home to photograph them, they would probably just think I'm daft. But maybe that's why I'm not a world famous video artist.
I can definitely see the influence of Aldous Huxley's "Doors of Perception" in these writings, particularly where he talks about the human senses beng "limiters" on the "spectrum of electromagnetic energy vibrations that make up the universe at large." But don't senses like taste, smell, touch and hearing have nothing to do with electromagnetic energy? Well nevermind. Viola writes, "Imagination is our key to the doorway of perception," rather than mescaline, as Huxley suggested. Further, that "the television medium... can offer us sight beyond the range of our everyday consciousness." This is strange statement. Why did he say television rather than film? I'm not sure I understand in what way Viola wants us "as viewers and creators" to use television in this way, although it did make me think of a lecture by Douglas Rushkoff where he talks about the remote control as a device that breaks up a continuous narrative, a cut-up machine like those experiments by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs.
Posted by Andrew Doro at September 21, 2006 12:00 AM