Bill Viola is recognized around the world as a major figure in video art. Many believe he is the most important artist
working in video today. With tapes of remarkable visual and aural beauty, poetic resonance and technical virtuosity,
Viola has virtually defined the state of the art for more than a decade and has given the young tradition at least a
score of its acknowledged masterpieces . There can be no serious center of film/video studies in the western world
and Japan that has not exhibited his work, and his influence on his contemporaries and on the new generation of
video artists in the United States is incalculable.
Born in New York in 1951, Viola received his early training in electronic music and video at Syracuse University;
his first videotapes were produced there in 1972 at the pioneering Synapse Video Center . Meanwhile he continued
working in electronic and acoustical sound. In 1973 he began a long association with composer David Tudor as a
founding member of Tudor's Rainforest ensemble; the following year he also performed with Alvin Lucier . He has
maintained active involvement in musical performance and sound installations ever since, an interest that is reflected
in the structure, rhythm and acoustic qualities of his work in video.
Conceptual and performance art were also important early influences, not only in the general cultural sense but
through working as technical assistant to other artists, first at the Synapse Video Center, later (from 1974 to 1976) as
technical director in charge of production at Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Italy. Nam June Paik, Alan Kaprow, Dennis
Oppenheim, Vito Acconci, Douglas Davis and Peter Campus were among the artists with whom Viola worked at
these facilities. Campus, who used video techniques to create visual metaphors for psychological and metaphysical
themes (as in Three Transitions , 1973), strongly influenced Viola's approach to performance in video. But Viola was
equally inspired by the work of experimental filmmakers, especially Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage. The
influence of Snow's 1966 classic of structural cinema, Wavelength, is apparent in The Space Between the Teeth
(1976) and Ancient of Days (1981) . References to Brakhage are found in Hatsu-Yume (First Dream) (1981) and in _I
Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986) .
The life of other cultures has also been an important influence on Viola's work. He has traveled to every continent
on the globe for the production of his videotapes, renowned for their exotic settings. For the first two years of this
decade he lived in Japan, where he studied with Zen priest Daien Tanaka and was artist in residence at the Sony
Corporation . Since 1982 he has resided in Southern California. Still a young man not yet midway through his career,
he has already received retrospective exhibitions at some of the most prestigious museums in the United States and
Europe, and has been honored with this country's highest awards for distinguished achievement in his field. He is
among the very few video artists who are successful enough to practice their craft full time without commercial
compromise.
The Reflecting Pool
El plano único de The Reflecting Pool está compuesto a partir de tres grabaciones diferentes, de forma que la imagen está “fragmentada en tres niveles de tiempo distintos (tiempo real, tiempo suspendido, lapso de tiempo) y reconstruida de suerte que se asemeje a la imagen de un espacio único” (8). El trucaje electrónico permite justamente des‑solidarizar los espacios en el seno de una misma imagen, dotándolos de autonomía temporal, permitiendo aquí una autonomía temporal, allí una cuasi inmovilidad, más allá una aceleración.
Con minimos recursos Viola hace un reflexión sobre la vida, la muerte, el nacimiento, el reflejo. Cuando esta persona salta, esperamos verla caer, la espectativa que crea es parte de la misma reflexión, a mi parecer este material tiene muchos niveles de lectura, muchos tiempos sucediendo a la vez, explora las posibilidades mas importantes que nos ofrece el cine y el avance tecnologico que permite la manipulación de los planos.
Este filme me transmite el tiempo contenido de las transiciónes del tiempo, se puede relacionar con las transicónes por las que pasamos todos los seres humanos a trvés dela propia existencia, parte demi lectura fue que seguimos siendo los mismos, en una posición casi siempre parecida mientras nuestro entorno cambia, cambiando también nuestro reflejo, que a veces es dificil de encontrar, en este caso la superficie reflejante es el agua, pero es una metafora del reflejo que buscamos en todos los acontesimientos.
Migration
The idea for Migration came to Viola while he was walking down a street one rainy day in New York. His glasses
were covered with raindrops and he saw that each drop was a lens. Everything around him was covered with little
hemispherical lenses that contained optical microcosms of the environment. He was surrounded by worlds within
worlds . He couldn't see the images in the beads of water on a passing car but he knew they were there. It was a
question of scale. He recalled an exhibition of satellite photos that showed first the east coast, then the New York
area, then just Manhattan, then just lower Manhattan . What fascinated him was not that one could seebuildings from
that distance, but that such detail wasn't the result of a zoom or a blowup as we normally understand them. They
hadn't used four different telephoto lenses and made four different pictures . It was all one computer-enhanced
electronic image, a database. The information in the closeup existed already in the larger-scale .
Con lo que me quedo de este trabajo es la interpretación de la gota que cae produciendo ondas en el agua junto con el sonido que no siempre cae en sincronía. Creo que este tipo de filme da la posibilidad de interpretarlo como queramos, a mi esa relación entre el sonido y las ondas me pareció muy bello y poético, después cuando se acerca la toma me doy cuenta de que no es como lo pensaba en un principio, pero no le quitó ese valor poético que le agregué, no hay porque tener una interpretación rigida a partír de estos materiales, creo que es justamente lo que no se busca.Ancient of Days
Ancient of Days is a kind of anthology of his experiments with time, particularly the relation of digital timecode
(used in computer editing) to perception. He may well be the only artist in the world today who is not only
systematically addressing this issue but is actually beginning to reveal some possibilities, specifying new trajectories
for cinematic language, whose evolution henceforth will depend on and be inseparable from the computer, that most
intelligent of possible clocks.
Bill Viola experimenta de nuevo con el tiempo, parece no estar conforme con un tiempo lineal y convencional. En "Ancient of days" hace una especie de timelapses en los que vemos el peso del tiempo reflejado por el cambio de luz sobre el mismo plano, me parece que tiene cualidades fantasmagoricas, el paso del tiempo se hace tan ligero y tan falso, que ya no importa que el sonido corresponda o no con la imagen. El filme comienza y termina con un reloj, reafirmando que lo que hace es manipular el tiempo.
Otro cuestionamiento viene hacia el final del filme, cuando la imagen que estamos viendo esta siendo proyectada en la calle en Japón, cuando la imagen se hace pública, y te das cuenta de que esta siendo representada dentro de otra representación, ¿Tendra esto relación con el final donde estamos viendo el interior de una casa?
Hatsu Yume
El título de la videocreación es una alegoría espiritual que compara la luz y la oscuridad con la vida y la muerte. Hace referencia a la cultura popular japonesa, donde las acciones realizadas el primer día del año son especialmente relevantes.
