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Bill Viola, born in New York, is a pioneering figure who played a crucial role in establishing video art as a major genre in contemporary art. He studied painting, new media, cognitive psychology, and electronic music at Syracuse University in New York, and was introduced to video art in the 1970s while working as an assistant to Nam June Paik during the early days of video technology. For over 40 years, Viola has explored fundamental human contemplations such as life and death, self-reflection, the unconscious mind, and emotion, creating more than 200 video works based on these themes.
He is known for transforming the technical aspects of video into emotional and spiritual experiences. As he once described his works as “visual poems written in the language of subjective perception,” Viola embraced new media and technologies emerging with technical advancements, while consistently integrating meditative Eastern philosophy—an underlying foundation of his thinking. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale twice, in 1995 and 2007. In 2014 and 2016, two of his works were permanently installed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, marking the first time video art was installed in a Church of England cathedral.
The ancient Greek word Pneuma means “breath,” but it also signifies “life force” and “soul.” Pneuma was born from a fusion of experiences: Bill Viola’s meaningful recognition of traces of light while experimenting with his first black-and-white video camera in the 1970s; childhood memories of mysterious patterns formed by light and darkness on the ceiling before falling asleep; and the environmental encounters he had while exploring desolate landscapes such as San Bernardino, California, for video research.
These elements came together in the 1990s, leading him to create works that explored the threshold between sight and perception through traces of light. This particular work holds a significant place as a milestone at the peak of Viola’s artistic career. The hazy, overlapping video images do not represent visual imagery in a conventional sense, but rather reveal how the mind perceives through an inner light—how memory and the inner self come to see.
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