Bill Viola

Bill Viola is internationally recognized as one of today's most successful video artists, he was born on 1951 and he grew up in queens, new york. He has been a very important part of the development of video as an official medium and he has helped expand its scope in areas such as technology, content etc. He has been creating videos for over 35 years, hes done things like videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environment etc. and they are shown in galleries all over the world. His concentration is very dynamic he focuses on universal things such as birth, death, and the unfolding of consciousness, he also creates work that reflect both western and eastern cultures.
The work i selected by him is called sweet light and it starts off with just a taping of flyings on a surface then he zooms out to show that they are on a windowsill in a room. He then pans around the room till a man shows up on a chair drinking something and he seems to be working and is frustrated. The next scene is of a rolled up piece of paper the man just threw and a bug crawls out of it and in the background a figure appears. The scene then changes all of a sudden and we are now circling a dinner table with a candle in the middle and for the rest of the video its just a bunch of moving lights then a man in white walks up. I actually hated this piece at first but now that its over i think its genius, i believe that it represents the 3 universal themes that i mentioned about earlier. The closeup on the flies was birth, then the zooming out and panning of the room is unfolding of consciousness and the white lights and man in white is death. I also believe that the dinner table was the connections we make through life which coincides with the unfolding of consciousness.