Reasons for knocking at an empty house

Chosen to represent the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale, artist Bill Viola is recognized internationally for his work in video and sound installations. This book brings together a selection of essays, notebook entries, interviews, drawings and descriptions of projects that map Viola's personal course through the readings, observations, experiments, and associations that form the groundwork for his art.

Each work illustrated is accompanied by a description by the artist as well as comments on the work's origins from the artist's notebooks.

For the last 25 years, Viola has used innovative multimedia technologies to explore the phenomenon of sense perception as a language of the body and avenue to self-knowledge, integrating many disciplines and philosophies to reveal contemporary art's relevance to the modern world. His views have deep roots in mysticism, poetry, philosophy, Eastern art, shamanism, Chinese Taoism, Sufism, and Zen Buddhism.

One of Viola's chief concerns today is to focus on the connection between our inner and outer lives, on the conception of the self as part of the whole.