Musings about technology, transcendence and Bill Viola

Bill Viola

Pioneer of video art and master of the high tech slow mo. His work is connected to ideas of the sublime and transcendence as he often references spiritual iconography in his work. My work last semester in VIAM utilized delicate materials, the sense of veiling and looking through. My research for this led me to the concept of the contemporary sublime. This work for Sculpture also has connections to it and I can see links with ideas of using video technology to create a transcendent scene by slowing everything down. Bill Viola has an interesting concept of the camera being ‘ a keeper of souls’ (see below). This hints at the immortality promised in a sense by technology, which I will talk about in greater detail below.

Bill Viola - Cameras are soul keepers

Interview about his near death experience in the lake when he was a child and how he realised that 'There s more than just the surface of life - the real things are under the surface'. He discovered video in 1969 and the blue light from the camera enthralled him and reminded him of the water from that NDE. He also says how we exist in the 'space between the physical things. We see them but we exist in the space between'. Viola also talks about the loss of his mother and his experience of being in the room with her when she died and coming to terms with someone being there and then all of a sudden not being there. He adds that for him that is why video and camera technology to him is a keeper of souls as he sees them as having a life and holding a life as they hold the feelings and memories.

Sourced from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uenrts2YHdI

Theresa Moerman in her thesis The Magic Mirror (Ch 3, p.34 2012) agrees with Barthes’ idea ‘ that the camera captures a moment in time which instantly is irrevocably lost, that is both dead and going to die’ (Camera Lucida p.96) however she suggests that it ‘also imbues the subject of the photograph with immortality’. Rather profoundly she states, ‘The photograph lives on when the subject cannot’. Further on in the chapter she suggests that photographs represent more ‘than just images and in fact constitute an invaluable link to the past and ourselves ’. She quotes John Stotesbury’s view of photographs as holding a ‘belief in immortality which denies the power of death’. I would agree with this from my journey and work on this project and suggest that the moving image does this perhaps to a greater extent as you can see the person breathing, moving and being in real time here and now in the recognizable settings of our world which make the event seem like its just happening now even if the memory about it has faded. In addition as the viewer you potentially hold the control over how often you want to playback the video and freeze it in certain places. Moerman elaborates on the photograph’s ability to transcend death saying it becomes a mediator between ‘preservation and reanimation of the original, a kind of time traveller’ where the people in them live ‘indefinitely in temporal loops, existing decades beyond their natural lives embalmed in a permanent state which affects neither their looks nor their age. They become immortal’. This sense of temporal looping was important in my videos where they were literally looping over and over again, highlighting this state and it was quite eerie to see them repeated over and over whilst I was setting up and yet there s this sense of emptiness that accompanies the viewing as they speak only of the past and was has been lost. In the digital age the computer becomes a mediator between past and the present, the tactile viewing experience of holding photographs exchanged for a more intangible viewing on a screen. As an 80 s child I don’t have video footage of my childhood or mum so its an interesting thought of how technology and the recording of moments has progressed in the last 30 years and how this interface affects how we view our pasts and ourselves.

Johnny Depp in the movie ‘Transcendence’ plays Dr Will Castor a brilliant scientist working on Artificial Intelligence, ‘working to create a sentient machine that combines the collective intelligence of everything ever known with the full range of human emotions. His highly controversial experiments have made him famous, but they have also made him the prime target of anti-technology extremists who will do whatever it takes to stop him. However, in their attempt to destroy Will, they inadvertently become the catalyst for him to succeed-to be a participant in his own transcendence. For his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany), both fellow researchers, the question is not if they can...but if they should. Their worst fears are realized as Will's thirst for knowledge evolves into a seemingly omnipresent quest for power, to what end is unknown. The only thing that is becoming terrifyingly clear is there may be no way to stop him’.(Warner Bros 2014, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2209764/) . ‘Transcendence’ gives a slightly different spin to the whole idea of immortality through technology as when Will dies he lives on in the computer programme he created. However he becomes very driven to take control over the world. It was an interesting side reference to view.

Questioning this whole idea of technology and how it has benefitted mankind is another artist influence, Zilvinis Kempinas whose work ‘Columns’ (2006) is on at the QAG in the exhibition ‘The Sublime’. This work plays with ideas of the monumental and unmonumental as well as permanence and impermanence. It is made up of magnetic VHS tape reaching to the roof which I found as a source of influence as to how to hang some of the tea bag material giving a sense of desire for in my work, memories through technology to provide a transcendent vision which they ultimately cannot seen in the ephemereal materials. This failure is also a part of Kempinas’ work as it states in the didactic, the nearly obsolete VHS tape holds ‘images of the past but these will soon no longer be viewable. Rather than its promise of progress, technology often reveals instead dead-ends and monumental failures’.

                                      Zilvanis Kempinas 
                                             Columns
                                                2006

After this process and journey of this semester I reflect am I closer to closure or has it stirred up more questions ? I m not sure I have the answer yet. I think going back is going to be challenging and wonderful and healing and heartbreaking.