Bill Viola — Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House

1983

Artists: Bill Viola · Year: 1983 · Medium: Single-channel video — processed and composited imagery on analog video · Substrate: Sony video cameras and editing decks; analog video processing; in some pieces, computer-generated imagery composited via video switchers · Place: Long Beach, California, USA · Institution: Independent; later LACMA, Getty, etc. Bill Viola is not exclusively a computer artist, but his video-art practice from the early 1980s onward made extensive use of computational image processing — analog-video effects, digital post-production as it became available, eventually computer-generated imagery integrated with photographed material. Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (1983) and the surrounding work of that decade use slow-motion, reverse-motion, extreme close-up, and compositing techniques to produce images of meditation, memory, and ritual that technology had not previously made available. Viola's aesthetic is specifically spiritual — he draws on Buddhist, Christian, and Sufi contemplative traditions — and his technical methods are in service of subject matter that might seem unrelated to the computational-art lineage. But the availability of precise temporal manipulation, of computer-controlled imagery at scale, is what makes the work possible. Without the technical substrate, Viola's slowed-down images of bodies submerged in water, his composite portraits of grief, his five-minute single-take contemplations could not exist. He is the video artist whose work has been most successful institutionally — retrospectives at MoMA, Getty, Grand Palais, Venice Biennale — and whose integration of computational methods with specifically non-computational subject matter has been most sustained. Viola died in July 2024. His archive is held by the Getty. Lore Viola trained at Syracuse University and worked at WNET's New Television Workshop alongside Paik in the 1970s. His practice became increasingly technology-intensive through the 1990s and 2000s; the later works involved HD video capture, computer-generated imagery, and elaborate projection systems. His wife and collaborator, Kira Perov, has managed the Viola studio throughout the artist's career and continues after his death. Sources • Viola, Bill; Perov, Kira — Bill Viola (Whitney Museum, 1997) • Getty Research Institute — Bill Viola archive • Bill Viola Studio — billviola.com