I swear every time I pick up my copy of Bill Viola's 'Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House' my mind is blown and my life is changed. I was scared to open it again as I used too many of his quotes in my last essay (they're all so relevant and GOOD!) but I couldn't stop myself. I was also scared that points may be too far fetched, but I don't think they are this time...
Viola literally stated what the meaning of life is, and the realisation of how true that was shook my bones.
Viola literally stated what the meaning of life is, and the realisation of how true that was shook my bones.
p.143 bill viola
As the gateway to the soul, the pupil of the eye has long been a powerful symbolic image and evocative physical object in the search for knowledge of the self. The colour of the pupil is black.It is on this black that you see your self-image when you try to look closely into your own eye, or into the eye of another… the largeness of your own image preventing you an unobstructed view within…. It is through this black that we confront the gaze of an animal, partly with fear, with curiosity, with familiarity, with mystery. We see ourselves in its eyes while sensing the irreconcilable otherness of an intelligence ordered around a world we can share in body but not in mind.
P.149 (right) sense of place
p.220 Perception over Time Transforms the Landscape into Story
p.221 Images Tell Lies: Perception is the way we contact the world, it is the language of being yet the senses have traditionally been considered the source of illusion.
..Artificial images do not portray reality accurately. They aspire to the image and not to the object, to visual perception and not to the experiential mind field…. Of course, the reason why artificial images succeed us that they rely heavily on the viewer’s prior knowledge that, for example, objects do have all their sides. They involve the viewers knowledge bas in their functioning. Human beings, therefore, have always been an integral part of any technology pf images. Perception is the input channel to the mind, and with new technologies, the call is first to the body, then the mind will follow.
Wilheim Reich, the Austrian psychologist who was imprisoned in America because his work was too accurate and unsettling for the establishment, realised that in fragmented industrialised societies, the body was the neglected key. To reach the mind, his therapy focused on healing the body through touch. “When I put my hands on the body,” he said, “I put my hands on the unconscious,”
p.223 One of the original sources of all philosophy is the paradox of the hard and the soft: the body and the soul; the outer physical world and the world of thoughts and images within. This is one of the greatest mysteries of life, and the good thing about mysteries in the classic sense is that they don’t have to be solved, only experienced. The great mystics of history bathed in mystery. Their goal was to translate experiences, not images or descriptions…
P.224 The Future of Technology is the Future of What is Real
With each new step in the evolution of technology, we take a step closer to our ideal of higher and higher quality, which actually means creating things that look more and more like nature itself…
…How close can we come to the true nature of things?
…in the end is the ultimate transparent state where there is no perceived difference between the simulation and reality, between ourselves and the other.
…As human beings we require limits and boundaries to function…
…Technology does constantly provoke us to ask what is real…
..When asked what is real, most people turn inwards, to their individual experience..they do not necessarily think of themselves standing there at the moment the question is asked. At that moment, of course, all these things are memories, mental images. Memory is the residing place of life experience, the collection that reveals and/or fabricates order and meaning. What is real, therefore, is what is psychologically meaningful. At one time in the past, the mythic and symbolic were real. Today, physical science has influences us to believe that the objects of the physical world are real. Yet, we surround ourselves with electronic images and transmitted information. Hollis Frampton called the movement in moving images “the movement of human consciousness itself. The images carry on our mental lives for us” he said, “darkly, whether we want them or not,” We already are, and always have been, in an imaginary landscape of perception.