The video installations of Bill Viola were just as breath-taking as the devastatingly beautiful architecture and vistas of the and Grounds.
In Passions, Viola constructed painterly scenes of actors experiencing the passions that medieval painters, artists and philosophers wrote so vigorouslyhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif about. These scenes were shot in beautiful, dramatic light against severe dark backgrounds and then slowed down so completely that one had to stand and wait for what seemed like an eternity of patience before they would change.
The most jarring and exciting part of the exhibition, though was walking into a huge space where his installation called 5 Angels for the Millenium played: 5 cinema size screens simultaneously played images of a human diving into water (but filmed from inside the water, so...emerging into...?...the water), slowed down to a speed to make them look unrecognizable and otherworldly.
It was an unforgettable aesthetic experience: unmatched by any I had experienced before.
My interest in video art was piqued on that day. The most natural context for expressing it was, for me at that moment, shaped by some of the reading I had been doing, and the new church in which my family was becoming involved.
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Here's a documentary about Bill Viola's work
