Sacred Geometry and Secular Science

Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois. 28 July 2012 until 28 October 2012.

Why video?

In 1969, I enrolled in art school intent on studying painting and sculpture — until I saw this beautiful glowing image on a television set. Since that moment, I have been on a non-stop wild ride as the medium has continued to change. We're still at the beginning of the digital era, which I feel will be as profound as the Industrial Revolution. It will ultimately entail the merging of man and machine, a complete recreation of the species.

How do you feel about technology?

Ambivalent. It can bring extraordinary visions, and tools for the advancement of science and culture or, as with the atom bomb, annihilate entire populations. At an audience with the Dalai Lama in 2005, I said that video was responsible for many of the world's problems. He held up a fork and said, “No. It's not the technology, it's the intention of the person. If I have hatred in my heart I can kill you with this fork, but if I have love in my heart I can feed you with it.”

In Bill Viola's Ocean Without a Shore, a wall of water symbolizes the threshold between life and death. Credit: KIRA PEROV

You've designed a meditative video game; what does that involve?

Since 2005, I've been working on an experimental video game called The Night Journey with Tracy Fullerton and her team at the Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. We are trying to use the medium to allow people to learn how to negotiate their inner world. The game is inspired by the writings of mystics such as Rumi and St Catherine of Siena. The player explores a darkening landscape, trying to delay nightfall to make a personal journey towards enlightenment. My prior video works are used as source material for interludes in which players encounter a special place for reflection.

Why are you drawn to the Renaissance?

It combined the two factors that have most defined my life — art and technology. There was an unprecedented influx of new technology into Europe, and an entire civilization was changed by artists — not old masters, but young punks. Michelangelo was 24 when he sculpted the Pietà and Masaccio was 23 when he created one of the first works incorporating accurate linear perspective. Older painters didn't even think it was art, but the young guys just ran with it; the same thing has been happening with digital devices. When I lived in Florence in Italy post-university, I walked past Michelangelo's David every day on my way to the video studio. What I saw in the David was perfection created by an artist who at the same time saw and sculpted with his inner eye. The camera for me represents not the objective recording of reality, but a way to see with my inner eye.

What is the relationship between art and science?

They are like a couple sharing the same dance floor but hearing different versions of a song. I've been thinking about the difference between knowledge and mystery. Knowledge is the accumulation of information that can be codified systematically. It is important because it can reach conclusions and terminate arguments, but there's something else underneath. Mystery is the gap in our knowledge, an infinite plane that ends in darkness. After a scientist wins a Nobel prize, they go forward into the darkness again. As an artist, I don't want to get to the end, I want to get to the point of mystery. It's the reason to keep moving, sensing, but not knowing, what lies just beyond our reach.

Tell me about your contribution to the exhibition at Loyola.

Bill Viola Credit: N. HIGGINS; BASED ON A PHOTO BY W. VANDENBRINK

The Last Angel, created in 2002, is one in a series of works created under water, experimenting with combining forward, reverse and slow motion, even turning the image upside down. On a large plasma screen mounted vertically on the wall, a calm underwater scene is patterned by shafts of light. Drawn by the light, a human form coalesces from within an infinite ocean and falls towards material existence in the world below, leaving a luminous explosion of churning turbulence in its wake. The accompanying sound amplifies the disturbance.

Why does your work often depict emotional extremes?

Art and science are like a couple sharing the same dance floor but hearing different versions of a song.

Extreme emotions give us the opportunity to 'go too far'. The history of art, as well as science, would not be possible without someone breaking the rules. Forays into the 'forbidden zone' of serendipitous encounters and random chance events are an essential part of what I do. In 1999, using the new high-resolution flat screens, I embarked on The Passions, a series that arose out of the profound experience surrounding the death of my father in 1998. I needed to slow things down to comprehend what I was experiencing. I found that a two-minute recording stretched over ten minutes increased the depth and intensity of what I was seeing and enabled me to come to terms with those emotions.

What do you hope your legacy as an artist will be?

To inspire a positive thought, an emotion, a gesture, a memory or a vision in a young person. One of the most moving things I have ever seen was an exhibition of palaeolithic tools at the Museum of Man in Paris. There I saw a reindeer antler with three small scratches in a perfect row. That was one of our ancestors saying, 'This is me, I was here and I exist'. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. That's what we're doing with cars and space travel, with all our tools and images. Just leaving something behind so that we can go forward.

Bill Viola: Reflections

Villa Panza, Varese, Italy. 12 May 2012 until 30 October 2012.