Bill Viola’s prolific writings explore a wide range of issues:  technical, aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual…  It would be a mistake, however, to think that Viola’s notebooks are simply reflections on his methods or anecdotal companions to his work; rather, these writings are intricately woven into his creative process.     In a conversation from 1992, Bill Viola explains that, ‘I always kept active notebooks… Everything I have ever published or created as an artist has come from these books.’  Paradoxically, Viola’s creative process, the results of which tend to move beyond what can be articulated in words, first passes through written language. 

In addition to the ‘philosophical’ and ‘spiritual’ nature of his work, Viola’s process itself seems to follow a philosophical trajectory.  There is a movement from ruminations in his notebooks about the unique characteristics of video to experiments with the interaction of video images and the human perceptual system then on, metaphorically and allegorically, to the metaphysical quest of the self.

I selected the following texts from Bill Viola’s Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House:  Writings 1973-1994 (edited by Robert Violette in collaboration with the author; The MIT Press in association with Anthony D’Offay Gallery, London; 1995) in order to demonstrate the breadth of thought found at the heart of Viola’s work as well as to isolate some of the central concerns, first articulated in his notebooks, running through his tripartite conception of vision and the videos in Bill Viola:  Light, Time, Being.

—Christopher Zimmerman

“If the doors to perception were cleansed, then everything would appear to man as it is—infinite.”
    —William Blake (1757-1827)

The spectrum of electromagnetic energy vibrations that make up the universe at large far exceeds the narrow band-width, or “window,” open to us through our sensory receptors.  As philosophers through the ages have stated, the human senses can thus be considered “limiters” to the total amount of energy bombarding our beings, preventing the individual from being overwhelmed by the tremendous volume of information existing at each and every instant.  Imagination is our key to the doorway of perception.  The television medium, when coupled with the human mind, can offer us sight beyond the range of our everyday consciousness, but only if it is our desire, both as viewers and as creators, to want to do so.   
—Note, 1979

  camera breaks from the eye

  camera as nose
  camera as ear
  camera as hand
  camera as insect
  camera as consciousness.

  camera as microscope
camera as telescope
—Note, 1980

Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat) 1979
I want to go to a place that seems like it’s at the end of the world.  A vantage point from which one can stand and peer out into the void—the world beyond—what would be above the surface to the fish.  Where all becomes strange and unfamiliar.  There is nothing to lean on.  No references.  It is said the mind plays “tricks.”  Standing there, a place where, after a long arduous journey, you realize you can go no further.  Each time you advance towards it, it recedes further.  You have reached the edge.  All you can do is stand there and peer out into the void, watching.  Standing there, you strain to look further, to see beyond, strain to make out familiar shapes and forms.  You finally realize that the void is yourself.  It is like some huge mirror for your mind.  Clear and uncluttered, it is the opposite of our urban distractive spaces.  Out here, the unbound mind can run free.  Imagination reigns.  Space becomes a projection screen.  Inside becomes outside.  You can see what you are.  I want to travel to this place and stand and watch with my camera.  Watch the days pass, watch the light change, listen to the landscape.  It’s a harsh place.  It is difficult to reach.  It feels like it’s at the end of the world.  It is the edge. 
—Note, April 29, 1979

‘Looking at the technical development of both video and film, we immediately notice a profound difference:  as film has evolved basically out of photography (a film is a succession of discrete photographs), video has emerged from audio technology.  A video camera is closer to a microphone in operation than it is to a film camera; video images are recorded on magnetic tape in a tape recorder.  Thus we find that video is closer in relationship to sound, or music, than it is to the visual media of film and photography.  One of the most fascinating aspects of video’s technical evolution, and the one that makes it most different from film, is that the video image existed for many years before a way was developed to record it.  In other words, it is live, simultaneous with experience.  Taping or recording is not an integral part of the system.  Film is not film unless it is filming (recording).  Video, however, is “videoing” all the time, continually in motion, putting out 30 frames, or images, a second.  Television existed, as radio did, as live broadcast for about 10 years before the videotape recorder was developed to record it.  Video’s roots in the live, not recorded, is the underlying characteristic of the medium.  Somehow, in a way no one has really been able to explain, time becomes more precious when dealing with video.’
—from ‘The Porcupine and the Car’ (1981)

‘As we continue to do our dance with technology, some of us more willingly than others, the importance of turning back towards ourselves, the prime mover of this technology, grows greater than the importance of any LSI circuit.  The sacred art of the past has unified form, function, and aesthetics around this single ultimate aim.  Today, development of self must precede development of the technology or we will go nowhere—there will be condominiums in data space (it has already begun with cable TV).  Applications of tools are only reflections of the users—chopsticks may be a simple eating utensil or a weapon, depending on who uses them.’
—from ‘Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?’ (1982)

page 119

Anthem will be based entirely on contemplative vision—the original source of true and balanced art—the original realism….

The process of producing Anthem is the process of coming to terms with the environment in which I live.  It is an attempt at integration, interpretation, and penetration of this place and this culture.
—Note, July 1982

Breaking out of the landscape… Breaking out of the logical shot order…Breaking out of the sweeping pans…

Reality is not logical, our perception of it is not logical, our conception of it is.  Reality is open-ended, our mental set imposes structure, order, connections.
         —Note, 1980

No beginning / No end / No direction / No duration
  Video as mind
         —Note, 1980

‘My interest in the various image systems of the cultures of the world involves a search for the image that is not an image.  This is why I am not interested in “realistic” rendering…  I am interested not so much in the image whose source lies in the phenomenal world, but rather the image as artifact, or result, or imprint, or even wholly determined by some inner realization.  It is the image of that inner state and as such must be considered completely accurate and realistic.  This is an approach to images from an entirely opposite direction—from within rather than without.’
—from ‘Note, June 1981’

‘Think of how you experience events in a dream or memory.  We call it “the mind’s eye.”  Usually, in recalling a scene or describing a dream, we do so from a mysterious, detached, third point of view.  We “see” the scene, and ourselves within it, from some other position, quite often off to the side and slightly above all the activity.  This is the original camera angle.  It existed long before there was even such a thing as a camera.  It is the point of view that goes wandering at night, that can fly above the mountains and walk through walls, returning safely by morning.  The notion that the camera is some surrogate eye, a metaphor for vision, is not enough.  It only grossly resembles the mechanics of the eye, and certainly not normal human stereoscopic vision with integration to brain.  In function, it acts more like something akin to what we call consciousness, or human attention.  Perhaps the mating of the video system with the computer currently underway will yield a closer approximation to true human “vision.”’
—from ‘Sight Unseen: Enlightened Squirrels and Fatal Experiments’ (1982)

‘History as a filter… it was constantly being rewritten.  Human memory (like the five senses) was also a filter.  Rather than being a past tense, memory becomes the future, informing all present actions and continually being updated, modified, and invented.’
—from ‘History, 10 Years, and the Dreamtime’ (1984)

‘Then there is the movement of awareness of the other, embodied in the physical separation of mother and child, and restated from the first conceptualization of persons and objects in a space outside the skin, to the first encounter with an animal in the wild.  The power of the gaze crystallizes these moments, and the eyes become the conduits of the exchange of energies between the organism and the environment, between the observer and the observed.  A line of sight can just as easily slice through the separation between subject and object as it can define it.  As the gateway to the soul, the pupil of the eye has long been a powerful symbolic image and evocative physical object in the search for knowledge of the self.  The color of the pupil is black.  It is on this black that you see your self-image when you try to look closely into your own eye, or into the eye of another… the largeness of your own image preventing you an unobstructed view within.’
—from “I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like’ (1986)

Vision as reception
  Vision as reflection
  Vision as projection
         —Note, 1986

‘In 1976, I made a piece called Migration in which I focused a camera on a single drop of water, revealing that the optical properties of the water drop created a miniature fish-eye lens; consequently, an image of the entire room and anyone in it was visible in each falling drop.  In 1979, I went to the Sahara Desert in Tunisia and, using a special telescopic lens attached to the video camera, recorded mirages and other visual phenomena caused by the effects of the intense heat on light waves traveling across a vast, open distance.  I have always considered that these two works are ultimately united—one pushes outwards, an investigation of infinite space, the other closes inwards, an investigation of the micro-world, and by doing so they both arrive at the same place.’
—from ‘Statements 1985’

‘I have learned so much from my work with video and sound, and it goes far beyond simply what I need to apply within my profession.  The real investigation is that of life and being itself; the medium is just a tool in this investigation.  I am disturbed by the over-emphasis on technology, particularly in America—the infatuation with high-tech gadgets.  This is also why I don’t like the label “video artist.”  I consider myself to be an artist.  I happen to use video because I live in the last part of the twentieth century, and the medium of video (or television) is clearly the most relevant visual art form in contemporary life.  The thread running through all art has always been the same.  Technologies change, but it is always imagination and desire that end up being the real limitations.  One of my sources of inspiration has been the thirteenth-century Persian poet and mystic, Rumi.  He once wrote, “New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity.  Therefore increase your necessity so that you may increase your perception.”’
—from ‘Statements 1985’

‘The video image is a standing wave pattern of electrical energy, a vibrating system composed of specific frequencies, as one would expect to find in any resonating object.  As has been described many times before, the image we see on the surface of the cathode ray tube is the trace of a single moving focused point of light from a stream of electrons hitting the screen from behind, causing its phosphor-coated surface to glow.  In video, a still image does not exist.  The fabric of all video images, moving or still, is the activated, constantly sweeping electron beam—the steady stream of electrical impulses coming from the camera or video recorder.  The divisions into lines and frames are solely divisions in time, the opening and closing of temporal windows that demarcate periods of activity within the flowing stream of electrons.  Thus, the video image is a living dynamic energy field, a vibration appearing solid only because it exceeds our ability to discern such fine slices of time.  All video has its roots in the live.  The vibrational acoustic character of video as a virtual image is the essence of its “liveness.”  Technologically, video has evolved out of sound (the electromagnetic) and its close association with cinema is misleading since film and its grandparent, the photographic process, are members of a completely different branch of the genealogical tree (the mechanical/chemical).  The video camera, as an electronic transducer of physical energy into electrical impulses, bears a closer original relation to the microphone than to the film camera.’
—from ‘The Sound of One Line Scanning’ (1986)

‘So what to do.  I feel that the answers lie within ourselves.  One thing would be to look at how we are living for clues.  We live suspended, like fish in water, within a media system that processes all culture as entertainment and an educational system that processes knowledge as product, both reflecting their positions within an entrenched capitalist system that has pervaded even the private inner lives of its citizens.  These are deep-seated beliefs and attitudes that cannot be overturned by a single informative afternoon at the local museum.  Art educators and museum and gallery personnel are confronted with a public that has been programmed into expecting that appreciating art, like everything else, must rely on the uncovering of a single answer or meaning, in this case which the artist has cleverly concealed within the work.  In other words, that art is something which one “gets.”  They wait to be told.  This thing found, then, frees the person to get on with the other works until they are finished in this manner and one may then leave the museum or gallery to continue with the afternoon’s entertainment.  Art becomes a “return” on their “investment” of time.  The majority of people today feel isolated and detached from art, and all well-meaning orientations and explanations that fill them with facts about the meanings in the work and intentions of the artists, in my opinion, only serve to separate them further from the inner life of the art before them.  As countless artists have stated before, the appreciation, as well as the making, of art demands a primacy of perception, and open child-like state of vulnerability and emotive sensitivity.  Education and extended knowledge can certainly be important, but the essence of the moment of confronting an art work is a purely individual encounter, an individual experience on individual terms, something that cannot be taught, and which increasing amounts of rational explanation and verbal discourse will proportionally diminish.’
—from ‘Interpreting a Broken Wine Glass’ (1988)

‘I have come to realize that the most important place where my work exists is not in the museum gallery, or in the screening room, or on television, and not even on the video screen itself, but in the mind of the viewer who has seen it.  In fact, it is only there that it can exist.  Freeze a video in time and you are left with a single static frame, isolated from context, and abandoned image, like a butterfly under glass with a pin through it.  Yet, during its normal presentation, viewers can only physically experience video one frame at a time.  One can never witness the whole all at once; by necessity it exists only as a function of individual memory.  This paradox gives video its living dynamic nature as part of the stream of human consciousness.  It is not the monitor, or the camera, or the tape, that is the basic material of video, but time itself.  Once you begin to work with time as an elemental material, then you have entered the domain of conceptual space.  A thought is a function of time, not a discrete object.  It is a process of unfoldment, an evolving thread of the living moment.  Awareness of time brings you into a world of process, into moving images that embody the movement of human consciousness itself.  If light is the basic material of the painter or photographer, then duration is the material prima of the time-based arts of cinema and video.  Duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.’
—from ‘Statement 1989’

‘The area of intellectual inquiry, which for the most part had been coming from personal study of various books and texts, is currently coming directly out of my own personal experience.  In one word, I would sum it up as “responsibility.”  Responsibility to myself, responsibility to family, and responsibility to the community (friends and strangers).  You know, we all need each other in one way or another.  Even though artists, like shamen, require time away from everyone else “out in the great loneliness” as the Inuit say, ultimately this time in solitude yields results that benefit the group.  It must, or else you have a disconnected, ineffectual art practice, impotent in terms of inner power and/or solely economic; in other words, the definition of decadence and to a large part a description of our current situation regarding the commercial art world.  So this responsibility I have been sensing lately, triggered by bringing up our two-and-a-half-year-old son, has to do with the recognition of art and artistic ability as a gift, rather than a possession or asset, that fits into the larger whole of self-family-community, with self-knowledge being the key thread that ties all of these things, our lives as solitary individuals and our lives as a group, together.
—from ‘Interview with Michael Nash’ (1990)  

‘To be sensitive to all frequencies at once, to be overwhelmed and delirious with sensory experience.
(Use of camera tubes sensitive to all frequencies—lenses sensitive to all distances.)  The articulation of the self through the extreme sensitivity and heightened awareness (right mind) is the great work—the true medium.  There is no other.  It is the source of video.  Where to put the mind is the primary question of composition, and of the creative act.’
       —from ‘Note, December 12, 1986’

‘A thought is a function of time, a pattern of growth, and not the “thing” that the lens of the printed word seems to objectify.  It is more like a cloud than a rock, although its effects can be just as long lasting as a block of stone, and its aging subject to the similar processes of destructive erosion and constructive edification.  Duration is the medium that makes thought possible, therefore duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.’
—from ‘Video Black—The Mortality of the Image (1990)

‘Looking closely into the eye, the first thing to be seen, indeed the only thing to be seen, is one’s own self-image.  This leads to the awareness of two curious properties of pupil gazing.  The first is the condition of infinite reflection, the first visual feedback.  The tiny person I see on the black field of the pupil also has an eye within which is reflected the tiny image of a person…and so on.  The second is the physical fact that the closer I get to have a better view into the eye, the larger my own image becomes, thus blocking my view within.  These two phenomena have each inspired ancient avenues of philosophical investigation and, in addition to the palpable ontological power of looking directly into the organs of sight, were considered proof of the uniqueness and special power of the eyes and the sense of sight.’
—from ‘Video Black—The Mortality of the Image (1990)

‘The unknown territory is an important traditional aspect of our environment and a vital part of the structure of our minds.  The unknown place on the other side of the mountain, across the sea, around the corner… unknown because the senses do not penetrate.’
—from ‘The Visionary Landscape of Perception’ (1989)

‘Sculpting with time.  Time is the basic material of film and video.  The mechanics of it may be cameras, film stock, and tape, but what you are working with is time.  You are creating events that are going to unfold, on some kind of rigid channel that is embodied in a strip of tape or celluloid, and that thing is coiled up as a potential experience to be unrolled.  In a certain way it is like a scroll, which is one of the most ancient forms of visual communication.  It is a very potent mechanical representation of our experience of time.’
         —Note, June 27, 1989

‘Twentieth-century artistic practice has been right, however, in its emphasis on individual vision and action.  As with any true political change, any shift in environmental or social awareness and practice (the two should be considered as one) can only be authentic if it originates and resides concurrently within each individual on their own terms.  This is the real political nature of spiritual practice, usually overlooked by political theorists, and also why Eastern religions, with their emphasis on individual enlightenment and self-awareness (devotees are called “practitioners” and not, as in Christianity, “followers”), represent such a vital resource for the equation of contemporary life.’
—from ‘The Body Asleep’ (1992)

‘I relate to the role of the mystic in the sense of following a via negativa—of feeling the basis of my work to be in unknowing, in doubt, in being lost, in questions and not answers—and that recognizing that personally the most important work I have done has come from not knowing what I was doing at the time I was doing it.’
—from ‘In Response to Questions from Jörg Zutter’ (1992)

‘I have felt for a long time that contemporary art, as well as philosophy, has neglected the fundamental energies of our beings.  It is easy to see how notions of a “progress” of ideas can pass over issues as basic as birth and death.  Yet these are the great themes of so much of human creative expression.  Since so much of my work has to do with “seeing” in an extended sense, I have found that raw and direct recordings in our current context can have great power.  These essential experiences are universal, profound, and mysterious, and lie like unsolved equations in contemporary society that have been put off to the side of the mathematician’s desk because they are unsolvable with the math currently in use.  But that the point, they are mysteries in the truest sense of the word, not meant to be solved, but rather experienced and inhabited.  This is the source of their knowledge.  It is my hope that for future generations, these images will lose their shock value because I feel that in some ways this clouds the real essence of their nature, even though at present the shock response is a necessary measure of how far from life’s sources industrialized society has come.  These “power images” are like wake-up calls, and I feel today there is a need to wake up the body before you can wake up the mind.’
—from ‘In Response to Questions from Jörg Zutter’ (1992)

‘For me, one of the most momentous events of the last 150 years is the animation of the image, the advent of moving images.  This introduction of time into visual art could prove to be as important as Brunelleschi’s pronouncement of perspective and demonstration of three-dimensional pictorial space.  Pictures now have a fourth dimensional form.  Images have now been given life.  They have behavior.  They have an existence in step with the time of our own thoughts and imaginings.  They are born, they grow, they change and die.  One of the characteristics of living things is that they can be many selves, multiple identities made up of many movements, contradictory, and all capable of constant transformation, instantaneously in the present as well as retrospectively in the future.  This for me is the most exciting thing about working as an artist at this time in history.  It is also the biggest responsibility.  It has taught me that the real raw material is not the camera and monitor, but time and experience itself, and that the real place the work exists is not on the screen or within the walls of the room, but in the mind and heart of the person who has seen it.  This is where all images live.’
—from ‘In Response to Questions from Jörg Zutter’ (1992)

‘The history of much of human culture, particularly in the Western world, has centered on the development of the material.  The contemporary electronic technologies of video and computer are simply the most recent stage of this evolution.  Historically in the West, the work of Isaac Newton, and the scientific revolution that followed him, greatly accelerated the emphasis on the material.  His discoveries and new approach shifted the inquiry into the nature of the world from religious/philosophical to scientific speculation, from emotive affinities to material causes, from empathy to reason:  the apple now falls not because it desires to be at its proper resting place, the earth, but because a physical force called gravity pulls it there; the celestial becomes mechanical, and the primary mode of questioning the world becomes not why, but how.  Today, at the close of the twentieth century, we are finding that questions of “how” are not enough to carry us forward through the millennium.  The crisis today in the industrialized world is a crisis of the inner life, not of the outer world.  It is focused on the individual, and on the confusing mix of signals and messages swirling around us that do not address a human being’s fundamental need to know and live the “why” of life.  Talk of machines, technologies, capabilities, costs, markets, infrastructures, offers no guidance and is inadequate and irrelevant to the development of our inner lives.  This is why art today, traditionally the articulation and expression of the “why” side of life, is inconsistent in its response to the new demands and responsibilities placed on it in this time of transition.’
—from ‘Between How and Why’ (1993)

Seeing and Being.  My work as an effort to unify perception and ontology.

Seeing is Being.  Aspects of this approach can be observed in the experience of being in the desert.  Standing in the vastness, two things happen.  First, you feel insignificant—a tiny black speck on the surface of the earth that can be wiped off at any instant.  But secondly, a part of you travels out along with that line of sight extending for 50 miles or more and becomes part of that landscape, perception as touching, as contact, becoming a perception.
        —Note, January 24, 1992

‘I always kept active notebooks… Everything I have ever published or created as an artist has come from these books.  I should call them the Minestrone recipe books.  It’s an interesting thing, all the words and so few pictures.  It was like I’ve been trying to arrive at the visual by skirting around it.  I guess I do have a mistrust of only working something out in pictures, a fear that it’s possible to make something that looks good (that is, is successful) but doesn’t think well (that is, have depth).  For me, the visual has always been the end, the last step, so that the final point in making a work is to plunge, to dive right into the image, totally, suddenly, from all the work before.  In my work, the visual is always subservient to the field, the total system of perception/cognition at work.  The five senses are not individual things but, integrated with the mind, they form a total system and create this field, an experiential field which is the basis of conscious awareness.  This is the only true whole image.’
—from ‘Putting the Whole Back Together’ (1992)

‘I consider art to be a branch of knowledge, not of aesthetics.  The purpose of the creative act changes to fulfill the needs of the times.  Today I think there is a requirement, a need for reintegration, for connecting us back to the fundamental questions and issues which have been passed by as active, imperative issues because of the “progress” of ideas.’
—from ‘Putting the Whole Back Together’ (1992)

‘There is a concept in recent Western European history of the progress of ideas.  The idea that we are making discoveries, adding building blocks to building blocks, and that this is all leading somewhere.  The past therefore becomes subservient, an inferior, naïve, or less developed version of the present, and the future becomes a potential ideal state.  Old ideas have value primarily as the currency of our present position.  The danger point in all of this is to assume that all questions are answerable first of all, and then that once they are answered, the answers are to be used as the basis for the next question.  We are rather far along now on this path, so that when we do encounter some of the elemental questions which gave the original impetus or push to philosophy and religion, we just assume that, because all the other things that came later were answerable, these are supposed to be treated in the same way.  They are not.  Ancient people call them “the Mysteries.”  These are not to be answered.  There is no answer to birth or death.  They are meant to be experienced, they can be approached and studied, but not finally answered.  In the same way, the question of why the apple falls wasn’t really a question to be solved.  So, I’ve found that as a contemporary artist in the late twentieth century, going into these things connects me back to traditional art and some of the directions which the avant-garde broke with in France some 150 years ago.’
—from ‘Putting the Whole Back Together’ (1992)