Dataspace
Since he began producing video art in the early 1970s, Bill Viola has explored ways to manipulate and restructure our perception of time and space through electronic media. In such video installations as Room for St. John of the Cross (1983), Viola has demonstrated the narrative potential of "dataspace," a territory of information in which all data exists in a continual present, outside the traditional definitions of time and space, available for use in endless juxtapositions. Viola arrives at the notion of dataspace by considering the spaces that have been constructed over the ages to record cultural history in architectural form, from Greek temples to Gothic cathedrals. He compares these "memory palaces" to the personal computer, with its capacity for storage, instant access and information retrieval. The computer has introduced the "next evolutionary step," Viola claims, in which ancient models of memory and artistic expression are reborn through the fluid processes of information technologies. bill viola
