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September 23, 2005
Bill Viola Reading
Bill Viola's "Statements" (1989 & 1985) overlap nicely with Marshall McLuhan, who I am reading for 'communications lab'. In my first few weeks @ ITP, i've found that there is a heavy overlap in all my classes, a strong common undercurrent that is driving all we do and everything we are striving for.
Viola mediates and zooms in on the conceptual delineations we take for granted until they fall apart and show themselves for what they really are, arbitrary. In different words, mimicking McLuhan, he is proposing a "medium of sense" which he calls experience. The true beauty is not in manifestations or implementations of experience but in experience as experience. Just as McLuhan isn't interested in light when it is used to perform brain surgery Viola isn't interested in hearing or vision, but the unified raw material that we call sense.
It may not be too far fetched to say that ITP as ITP is the medium, the true vision of emerging technologies. Classes and floor collaborations are only useful in that they allow us to travel back up and see the unified, originating whole.
Posted by mb2811 at September 23, 2005 02:17 AM