Bill Viola

born 1951 in New York, USA
lives and works in Long Beach, California, USA

Born into an Italian American family, Bill Viola studied electrical engineering, literature and mysticism at the Experimental Studios of Syracuse University before receiving his bachelor of fine arts. There’s an autobiographical thread through some of Viola’s work and one incident – an early near drowning – has played a part: Viola was captivated by this magical but potentially lethal submarine world which continues to find form in some of the mesmerising video images he creates.

For 18 months in the mid 1970s, Viola lived in Florence, Italy, working in one of the first video art studios in Europe as technical director of production. In those days, these places were homespun, lab-like and experimental, attracting non-specialists and encouraging collaboration. From there, Viola journeyed to the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali and Japan, absorbing the traditional performing arts of those cultures. He was a member of David Tudor’s radical Rainforest ensemble for seven years, where they used eight channels for a sound system that surrounded the audience, and also assisted Nam June Paik with exhibition installation. From 1976 to 1980, he created a series of intensely personal single-channel videos as artist-in-residence at the public television laboratory Channel 13 in New York.

In 1977, Viola was invited to Melbourne’s La Trobe University by its cultural arts director Kira Perov, whom he subsequently married. They have since worked and travelled together: including studying Buddhism with a Zen master in Japan and animal consciousness at the San Diego Zoo; and recording shimmering mirages of Chott el-Djerid in the Sahara desert, nocturnal desert landscapes in the American Southwest and prayer blessings with the Dalai Lama.

Read more about Bill Viola’s 2008 Kaldor project.

See also Bill Viola website.