Bill Viola: Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House

Writings 1973-1994

Chosen to represent the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale, Bill Viola, a New York artist living on the West Coast, is recognized internationally for his work in video and sound installations. This book brings together a selection of essays, notebook entries, drawings, and descriptions of projects that map Viola's personal course through the readings, observations, experiments, and associations that form the groundwork for his art. Each work illustrated is accompanied by a description by the artist, as well as comments on the work's origins from the artist's notebooks.

Innovative multimedia technologies

For the last 25 years, Bill Viola has used innovative multimedia technologies to explore the phenomena of sense perception as a language of the body and avenue to self-knowledge, integrating many disciplines and philosophies to reveal contemporary art's relevance to the modern world. His views have deep roots in mysticism, poetry, philosophy, Eastern art, shamanism, Chinese Taoism, Sufism, and Zen Buddhism. Viola's chief concerns today are to draw attention to the upset ecological balance of nature by focusing on the connection between our inner and outer lives, on the conception of the self as part of the whole.

Bill Viola

Bill Viola, born in 1951, is widely recognized as one of the leading video artists on the international scene. For over 30 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, and works for television broadcast.
Since the early 1970s, Viola has used video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. Bill Viola received his BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973. Since then he has created over 150 works that have been shown in museums, galleries, film festivals, and on public television worldwide.
Bill Viola represented the U.S. at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995. In 1997 the Whitney Museum of American Art organized Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey, an exhibition that travelled for two years to six museums in the United States and Europe. Bill Viola lives and works in Long Beach, California.

Writings by Bill Viola

Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House : Writings 1973-1994 by Bill Viola
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262720256

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