Bill Viola in Dialogue Selected Writings and Lectures

The Museum der Moderne Salzburg is dedicating a comprehensive exhibition to the US-American video and installation artist Bill Viola, offering an overview of his oeuvre that now stretches over fifty years. Viola is regarded across the world as a pioneer of video and media art. The accompanying book Bill Viola in Dialogue. Selected Writings and Lectures contains, in addition to Bill Viola’s central texts (among others: The Porcupine and the Car, 1981; Sight Unseen, 1982; The Sound of One Line Scanning, 1984; The Body Asleep, 1992; Presence and Absence, 2007), as well as source texts by John Cage, Peter Campus, Hollis Frampton, David Tudor, and Peter Sellars. The volume can thus be genuinely useful for understanding Bill Viola’s work. And his works, some of which are expansive and immersive, are visually seductive but at the same time highly rational and deeply intuitive. He focuses his attention on the specific interactions that occur between his images and those who observe them. In Viola’s opinion, his work does not unfold its effects solely on the video screen but also, and above all, in the minds of those who have experienced it.

Bill Viola, born in 1951, is regarded worldwide as a pioneer of video and media art. With the early 1970s, he consistently used the most modern electronic technologies and created haunting video and sound installations that address the question of life and being.

Bill Viola’s texts: The Porcupine and the Car (1981) Sight Unseen: Enlighted Squirrels and Fatal Experiments (1982) History, 10 Years and the Dreamtime (1984) The Sound of One Line Scanning (1986) Video Black – The Mortality of the Image (1990) The Body Asleep (1992) Video Art, Sense Perception and Human Experience – Iconic-Turn Lecture (2003) David Tudor – The Delicate Art of Falling (2004) Presence and Absence. Visions and the Invisible in the Media Age – Tanner-Lecture (2007) Peter Campus – Image and Self (2010) Other authors: John Cage: Exmperimental Music (1958) Peter Campus: Video as a Function of Reality (1974) Hollis Frampton: The Withering Away of the State of Art (1974) David Tudor: I Smile When the Sound Is Singing Through the Space (1988) Peter Sellars: (Text from:) The Passions (2003) Kira Perov: A Creative Journey (2019)