Question

10-Answer the question, "What is video art?" Research the video art of Bill Viola. Who is he, and in what ways does his background influence his video art creation? Analyze Viola’s video installations. What meanings, if any, do you think Viola’s videos are trying to express? Do you see any similarities in symbolism in his videos? Explain.

Answer 1

Video art is a form of an art that depends on video technology as a visual and also combined with a audio medium.

Bill Viola born on January 25th, 1951 in New York, is internationally recognized as one of today's leading artists. He is a contemporary video artist who is also known for electronic art and new media art. His works on art mainly focus on the fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness. " Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House" is one of his best known works. Viola always relies little on digital editing while other video artists adopted new technologies to their work done and his extreme slow motion on videos added weightage to his work. For instance., "The Quintet Series" which is a set of 4 separate videos shows the expressions of 5 actors in slow motion helps the viewers to detect the changing expressions of actors every minute in detail. The Renaissance art that he was known for while living in Florence, became a major source of visual art for some of his later video productions. His study on non-Western art and cultures opened up the way to most of his aesthetic sensibility and much more on art in prayer, meditation and healing.

Viola's art on majority deals with the central themes of human consciousness and experiences of birth, death, love, emotion and humanist spirituality. Along with this, medieval and renaissance devotional art also have major role in his art work. His work can be divided into conceptual, visual, a unique combination of conceptual and visual and also dualism. For example., life and death, stressed and calm, loud and quiet. From this, we can understand that his main goal is to give visual form of all life experiences that we cannot normally see or experience.

To conclude, he was on of the earliest artists to explore the potential of the video camera, which is in its most basic form in the 1970s only vaguely resembles the sophisticated devices of today. His use of extreme slow motion is a kind of response to the anxiety of being aware of our mortality. More than simply creating a video, he created environments that were highly immersive.