Congrats and hat’s off to pioneering video artist Bill Viola for his recent feature retrospective in Forbes.
The article salutes a 40-year career—a time span that neatly parallels video technology itself—in the use of electronic media to convey experiential expression. Seems he took to heart, then took to its ultimate conclusion, the proposition that if a picture is worth X words, then moving pictures must equal Xy.
You’ll find in Viola’s work an interplay of time and emotion, and motive expressions of a range of 
human experiences. Also notable is the recurring theme of natural elements, with a startling emphasis on water and immersion. Only speculating here, but this could very well be a constant reliving of a near-drowning incident from his
youth, which took him to what he later described as “the most beautiful world I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Whatever the impetus, Bill Viola seems driven to keeping showing us the flickering and unfolding images that describe his world, our world, and worlds both alien and disturbingly familiar….
