Bill Viola
[Artist, b. 1951, New York City, lives in Los Angeles.]
The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.
It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.
I hope we’ll be able to see that in our lifetime: the end of the camera! When I’m in Paris, I’ll buy a big bottle of champagne and I’ll save it for that day, for the day when they’ll be no more camera.
Fifty years from now I don’t think optical realism is going to be an issue in visual communication any more. Experience is so much richer than light falling on your retina. You embody a microcosm of reality when you walk down the street—your memories, your varying degrees of awareness of what's going on around you, everything we could call the contextualizing information. Representing that information is going to be the main issue in the years ahead—how the world meets the mind, not the eye.
One day in 1425, Filippo Brunelleschi walked out onto the Piazza del Duomo in Florence, and standing at the main doors to the cathedral, facing the baptistery across the piazza, he set up a small wooden box on a stand... To a twentieth-century observer, the only interpretation of this scene could be that of a photographer demonstrating a new camera, and by expanding the definition of photography perhaps more than is acceptable, Brunelleschi’s box could be considered a crude camera. For a citizen of fifteenth-century Florence, the effects of looking into this device were as mind-boggling and astounding as if seeing an actual camera for the first time. Peering into the small hole, they first saw the direct monocular view of the baptistery across the way. Then, by the flip of a lever, a mirror was moved into position and a small painting of the baptistery appeared, exactly in line and proportional to the direct view. In fact, in regards to geometry and form, the two were barely distinguishable. Brunelleschi had made a sharp right-hand turn out of the Middle Ages.