Prompt: For each readings (3 total) you will be responsible for responding to questions posed by the instructor.  Each question response should be approximately one paragraph. Reading responses are due by the in-class discussion. These responses will help guide our in-class conversations on the readings. 

 

#1 “Artists have known for a long time that the most interesting connections in things involve areas of low, or ambiguous, information, so-called “gaps” in recognition. This is the time of involvement, of participation by the viewer, in a work of art. The process of learning itself demands that initially one must be confronted with something one does not understand. Rene Magritte wrote, “People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking ‘What does this mean?’, they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things.”

How have you explored “gaps in recognition” in your work this quarter? Have you engaged with “the inherent poetry and mystery of the image”? Relate this to an artist/artwork/peer’s work we have seen this quarter that you think has successfully achieved this.

#2 Pick an excerpt from the reading that relates to your experience of working with video as an artistic medium in this class. Explain this connection.

#3 In the reading artist John Baldessari is quoted “…video is like a pencil. Art is just one of the things you can do with it.” (pp. 70) Explain what this means. In the article, how does Viola speak to the creative possibilities of video? Give examples and relate this to an experience you have had in the class.

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Bill Viola

Reasons for Knocking at an

Empty House

Writings 1973-1994

Edited by Robert Violette in collaboration with the author

Introduction by Jean -Christophe Ammann

The MIT Press

Anthony d’Offay Gallery London

Text © 1995 Bill Viola
Copyright © 1995 Bill Viola and Anthony d’Offay Gallery
“Violence and Beauty” © 1995 Jean-Christophe Ammann

First published in the United States in 1995 by

The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,

in association with the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced

in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means (including
photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without
permission in writing from the publisher.

Designed by Peter B. Willberg

Typeset by ACC Computing

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Frontispiece: Bill Viola on location in New York during production of

Sodium Vapor (including Constellations and Oracle), 1979, videotape,
color, stereo sound, 15:14 minutes. Photo: Kira Perov.

Cover: Bill Viola in What Is Not and That Which Is (detail), 1992, video/
sound installation. Edition 1: Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo,

Mexico City. Photo: Kira Perov.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Viola, Bill, 1951-

Reasons for knocking at an empty house: writings 1973-1994 /
Bill Viola; edited by Robert Violette in collaboration with the author;

introduction by Jean-Christophe Ammann.

p. em.
Includes chronology, bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-262-72025-6 (pb: acid-free paper)
1. Viola, Bill, 1951- -Philosophy. 2. Viola, Bill;

1951- -Themes, motives. 1. Violette, Robert. II. Title.

N6537.V56A35 1995

700.92-dc20

95-14426

CIP

The Porcupine and the Car

Once, a friend of mine gave me a shopping bag full of used audio

cassette tapes that he had retrieved from the garbage at his office.

Thrilled at the prospect of unlimited free recording time, I got an

idea to set up a tape recorder right in the center of activity in my

house, the kitchen, and to try and record everything that went on.

My idea was to have an ongoing, almost continuous, record of

all sonic activity in that space. When played back, it would create

a sort of stream-of-consciousness parallel world to the present,

but displaced in time. I kept the recorder loaded with tapes all the

time I was at home, which then being my summer vacation was

practically all the time. By the end of the week, when I had

accumulated well over 24 hours of tape, I suddenly realized a

distressing thought. I would need 24 hours, exactly the time it took
to record, to play all this stuff back. Furthermore, if I kept this

up, say, for a year, I would have to stop after six months to begin

playing back, and if I got really ambitious and made it my life’s

work, I would have to stop my life when it was only half over to sit
down and listen to all the material for the rest of my life, plus a

little additional time for rewinding all the cassettes. It was a

horrible thought, so I took down my tape recorder and immediately

stopped the project.

There is another way to look at the functioning of human sensory

systems, at the perception of the world and our particular place in it.

The common conception is to compare our sense organs with windows,

to consider them as openings through which we peer out into the world

at large. The twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson suggested,

however, that the human senses should be regarded as limiters to the
total amount of energy that bombards our beings, preventing the

individual from being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of informa­

tion that exists at each and every instant. A glance at a scientific chart

showing the spectrum of electromagnetic energy vibration that makes

First published in Image Forum (Tokyo), vol. 2, no. 3 (January 1981), 46-55.

59

up the universe, and the narrow slit, or bandwidth, in that scale

corresponding to the small range of these vibrations to which our

sensory receptors are sensitive, and it would seem that this is indeed the

case. As the poet William Blake wrote in 1793, “If the doors to

perception were cleansed, then everything would appear to man as it

is-infinite.”

Information is in a way the opposite of garbage, although in our

contemporary commercialized world they may at times appear identi­

cal. Both are products of man-made processes, and, with the exc.eption

of a few crazy artists now, and some archaeologists far in the future, we

can generally say that garbage loses value over time, while information

seems to be the process of something gaining value over time. As a rule,

information is something to preserve, garbage is something to be

destroyed. However, both can be looked on as a kind of waste product, a

physical burden, and for contemporary society both are among the most

pressing problems of the day. An ancient Sufi saying states that a heavy

load of broken pottery and a heavy load of books is the same for the

donkey. A recent magazine advertisement for Xerox photocopy machines

offers their product as a salvation for today’s office staff rapidly sinking

under the weight of the ever-mounting information deluge.

Consider for a moment the total number of books, magazine and

newspaper articles, radio and television programs, records, videotapes,

and films produced in one week alone, and it becomes clear that the

major task of today is not information production, but information

management (in other words, not information storage but information

retrieval; this is precisely what Xerox was selling in their magazine

advertisement). In this light, the main problem for artists using video

these days lies in deciding what not to record. Making a videotape,
therefore, might not be so much the creation or building up of some

thing, but more like the cutting or carving away of everything else

until only a specific thing remains. A similar concept can be seen in

Indian classical music and how it differs in approach from Western

classical music. Among their many divergencies, two are pertinent

here: Indian music places great emphasis on free inspirational playing,

or improvisation, and also on its use of the drone. Of the two, the latter

is significant because it represents a very different musical (and

60 The Porcupine and the Car

cultural) philosophy. Western music builds things up, piles notes on top
of notes, forms on top of forms, in the way that one would construct a

building, until at last the piece is complete. Its base is silence, all the
music proceeds from this point. Indian music begins from sound; all

the notes and possible notes to be played in a piece are present in the

form of the tambura, before the main musicians even start playing.

The tambura is a drone instrument, usually of four or five strings, that,

due to the particular construction of its bridge, amplifies the overtone

or harmonic series of the individual notes in each tuned string. This

series of overtone notes describes the scale that the musicians are

playing. It produces the familiar complex buzzing or ringing sound that

has become for many foreigners “that Indian-music sound.” Therefore,

when the main musicians play, they are pulling notes out of this

already ongoing sound field, the drone. There is no silence. The

musicians say that this concept relates to the Hindu philosophy of the

cosmic sound or vibration, “Om,” which is ever present, going on

without beginning or end, everywhere within the universe, and every­

thing proceeds from it.

Contemporary physics, which has been expanding its investigations

into the cosmos to include a range in scale (from the micro to macro)

that is staggering to the imagination, complains of a problem related to

coping with this enormous barrage of information. At Princeton’s

Institute for Advanced Study, the physicist Freeman Dyson recently
declared, “The main problem in particle physics today is to find a

problem. That’s where the really hard work is.” When one is starting

out in video, however, even before setting out to find a problem,

the hard work at first is to understand the technology, acquire the

technical experience and know ledge, and develop craft and technique.

This has proved to be a lot more difficult than expected, since at the

outset video is so deceptively easy to work with (as will be further

discussed). The entire first wave of what is called video art, a period

of roughly 13 years from 1963 to 1976 but concentrated in the early

seventies, was taken up with just this process. Most of the early video

work was devoted to finding “the unique characteristics of the

medium.” This is without a doubt very important knowledge to

acquire, but now, however, most young artists in the eighties should

The Porcupine and the Car 61

recognize that this is work they need to do privately, to discover on

their own. As artistic statements these have already been publicly

made.

Some “purist” artists today insist on working in this way, saying

that their efforts must be only “video” in nature. Unfortunately they

often end up closing themselves off to a great deal of potentially

valuable work done in other fields, notably film. Furthermore, since the
technology of video is still undergoing rapid change, it is sometimes

difficult to tell exactly what its unique characteristics are. (The exact
form of, and precise editing on, the frame is one of the traits that the

early video purists said was specific to film, yet the facility is now taken

for granted by most videomakers using automated electronic video

editing systems.) These artists are correct, however, in maintaining that
video ought to be taken for what it is, not for what it is like. Looking at

the technical development of both video and film, we immediately

notice a profound difference: as film has evolved basically out of

photography (a film is a succession of discrete photographs), video has
emerged from audio technology. A video camera is closer to a micro­

phone in operation than it is to a film camera; video images are

recorded on magnetic tape in a tape recorder. Thus we find that video

is closer in relationship to sound, or music, than it is to the visual media

of film and photography. (This will be the topic of another essay.)
One of the most fascinating aspects of video’s technical evolution,

and the one that makes it most different from film, is that the video

image existed for many years before a way was developed to record it.
In other words, it is live, simultaneous with experience. Taping or

recording is not an integral part of the system. Film is not film unless it
is filming (recording). Video, however, is “videoing” all the time,
continually in motion, putting out 30 frames, or images, a second. (In
Europe this is 25 frames, due to differences in AC power cycles.)
Television existed, as radio did, as live broadcast for about 10 years

before the videotape recorder was developed to record it. Video’s roots

in the live, not recorded, is the underlying characteristic of the

medium. Somehow, in a way no one has really been able to explain,

time becomes more precious when dealing with video. One’s first

instinct is to tape everything, but soon this initially easy exercise gives

62 The Porcupine and the Car

way to a realization that it is a very difficult medium. The slack in

video art activity in the late 1970s is testimony to this fact.

When one makes a videotape, one is interfering with an ongoing

process, the scanning of the camera. The image one sees on the monitor

screen is not really an image at all, but the precise and extremely rapid

tracing of a glowing phosphor dot. Due to persistance of human vision,

and a slight lag in the phosphor glow, one sees a complete image which

is really nothing more than a moving point of light. Robert Arns,

writing in Arts Canada magazine seven years ago, described film and
video as illusion-producing media: both give the illusion of experience

in light and sound, but the nature of their illusions is quite different.
In film, Arns says, the basic illusion is of movement, produced by the

succession of still images flashing on the screen. In video, stillness is the

basic illusion: a still image does not exist because the video signal is in

constant motion scanning across the screen.

The subsequent evolution of video from the early days has been

aimed at increasing control over this continually moving system;

in other words, improving control over time. After videotape recorders

were invented, the next obstacle was the editing of the tape (control of
pre-recorded time), a huge problem as most new owners of home video
recorders are discovering (home units can record and play back only;
they have no editing facility). At first editing was done physically, by
splicing the tape, an unwieldy, awkward, and technically disastrous

process. Later, electronic editing was introduced where the desired

signal was recorded on another VTR (videotape recorder), posing some
new problems but still the system in use today. A remarkable fact is

that it was not until 197 4, when computer controlled editing systems

were introduced in the United States, that the video producer had

precise and accurate access to specific individual frames of video for

editing. Most filmmakers still find this hard to believe. In this light,

it is easy to see why most video artists have been slow in developing

a control and sense of time. Editing equipment remains the most

difficult and expensive to obtain, so in this area many artists simply

lack experience. Most of the early tapes of Bruce Nauman (one
of the first video artists) are 60 minutes long, the length of a reel of
half-inch tape.

The Porcupine and the Car 63

A common complaint of the super-8 home movie makers has been

that the restriction of the three-minute cartridge causes every cut to be
shortened; so that maintaining continuity becomes a problem. Many

home movies look like Sergei Eisenstein’s montage technique films.

Home video users, on the other hand, find there is a tendency just to

load a one-hour cassette and shoot away continuously. In this case, the

continuity of the long shot becomes the problem.

The mass replication aspect of video images is an important factor

for artists, because the manual skill of accurate rendering, held in the

West since the Renaissance to be a corner-stone of the artist’s craft, is

now no longer an issue. We have been witnessing its decline since the

arrival of photography in the nineteenth century. There are neverthe­
less many people today who still think that an artist is someone who

draws realistically; indeed, the training given in many art schools
seems to agree with this perception. Gradually, however, more people

are realizing that the twentieth-century artist is not necessarily

someone who draws well, but someone who thinks well.

As we move faster and faster into the age of electronic communica­

tion, the technology seems to be evolving increasingly realistic methods

of rendering the real world. The often-cited act of taking the image, or

representation, of the thing to be the thing itself seems to have become

a particularly contemporary phenomenon. We rely more and more on

electronic data as a surrogate for direct social interaction. No one has

ever confused a portrait painting, or even an early black-and-white

photograph, with the person it depicted. However, when telephones

were first installed and people could speak directly over long distances

but not face to face, the English slang word “phoney” came into use.

Fearful that the new device could be used to deceive, people used

“phoney” to describe someone or something that wasn’t real or true.

The genuine “hyper-realist” artists of today are not the painters of the

school of the same name, but the commercial film and television

producers; for it is they who deal with something that has become

almost more real than real: a person’s image.

Reflecting on this trend of the recording media becoming more and

more realistic, one can easily say that their ultimate goal is perhaps to

become invisible, to become completely transparent, to become

64 The Porcupine and the Car

indistinguishable from what they record (i.e., to achieve the highest

“fidelity”). Looking to the future, most people in the field would say

that film and television are steering themselves towards some kind of

life-size, three-dimensional, holographic, audio-visual projection, almost

indistinguishable from a real scene. Farther far-out futurists speak of a

medium-less medium, electrical stimulation directly to the brain to

evoke sequences of mental sensations virtually identical with perceived

external reality. Of course, this is all still a long way off, and if energy

prices keep going up we will all have to burn our home video recorders

as firewood long before.

Today, various distortions (differences between the recorded object

and the actual object caused by the physical characteristics of the

recording media) are listed by manufacturers, along with weight, size,

etc., as specifications describing their products. An important one for

tape recorders is the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), which is basically a

measurement of the difference in level between the signal (the thing

recorded) and the level of internal noise (in audio heard as hiss)

inherent in the electronic circuits of the tape machine itself. Quality of
equipment and, therefore, price are determined by the lowest amounts

of distortion (or deviation from reality) present in the system.
One of the most interesting aspects of the recording media is how

they tell us so much about the way we perceive the world. Experimen­

tal psychologists were among the first to realize that recording media

have provided us with surrogate sensory perceptual systems, in some

ways similar, in some ways different, from our own, but nonetheless

with a specific set of characteristics that we can hold up and compare

against ourselves. This has proved invaluable in laboratory experiments
on perception. One might think that the distortions described above are

the sole property of electronic systems, but this does not seem to be the

case. John Cage, the contemporary composer, often tells the story of an

experience he had inside the anechoic chamber at MIT in Boston. An

anechoic chamber is a completely soundproof room, designed so that no

sound is reflected from its walls; sound travels out from a source but

does not bounce back. Cage was let inside this soundless space and left

alone for a short time. When he emerged, he asked the engineer why,

if the room was silent, had he heard two sounds. He described them to

The Porcupine and the Car 65

the engineer, who said that the high one was his nervous system in

operation, and that the low one was his blood in circulation. Human

“signal-to-noise” ratio.

Experiences such as these give us a very different view of what we

call information. In fact, as some have suggested, information may be

to a large extent the projection of our internal structure and biophysical

order onto the external world. Dr. John Lilly, pioneer researcher in

communication with dolphins, conducted some extremely interesting

experiments on himself after his initial dolphin research. The major

breakthrough in this work was Lilly’s decision to use himself as subject,

a reversal of the dominant role of the scientist as outside observer. In

so doing, he immediately entered the domain of the subjective. Lilly’s

work involved immersing himself in a sensory deprivation environ­

ment even more extreme than the one Cage found himself in. This was

a tank of salt-water heated to the same temperature as the human

bloodstream. There was no light, no sound; the buoyancy of the salt­

water reduced the effects of gravity and minimized the sense of touch.

Lilly, mostly submerged with only his face above water to breathe,

found it difficult to sense the difference between his inside and outside.

(It all seems remarkably like a womb.) Floating in this state of

nothingness, he even discovered that he could relax his muscles enough
to urinate without thinking about it. The water in the tank was

constantly filtered and recirculated, so that he could remain inside for

hours without interruption.

It is hard to imagine what this experience can be like. One’s first

thought is that it must be like nothing, or similar perhaps to when one
goes to sleep, or stares at a blank wall or into a dark room. Lilly found,

however, that it was not like this at all. Instead, he saw things, he

heard things, and his experience was almost as full and cluttered as his

everyday life. Lilly believed these phenomena to be hallucinations and

for a while tried to invent ways to quell them. But then he realized a
startling thought: if there is no outside stimulation, the mind seems to

make up things to perceive that appear to come from the outside. So

perhaps he actually saw the patterns of his own mind, the projections of

his own brain in the process of thinking. He was looking at an audio­
visual display of the neurological circuits at work in his brain.

66 The Porcupine and the Car

This phenomenon has been known in various forms throughout the

ages. People have always spoken of the “rabbit” or the “man” in the
moon, and cloud formations have been a popular form of image

visualization. In Western science, theories of visual perception have

proceeded from the emission theory (i.e., that the eye sends out rays or
particles which strike objects in the external world and enable percep­

tion) to the current reception model (that the retina is a surface that

senses the reception of light rays as photons coming in to strike it from

the outside). The experimental psychologist Rorschach has immorta­

lized his name in connection with this process by his famous ink-blot

test, in which a random ink-blot is made on a piece of paper and

subjects are asked to report what they see in its abstract shapes. Artists

have known for a long time that the most interesting connections in

things involve areas of low, or ambiguous, information, so-called “gaps”

in recognition. This is the time of involvement, of participation by the

viewer, in a work of art. The process of learning itself demands that

initially one must be confronted with something one does not under­

stand. Rene Magritte wrote, “People who look for symbolic meanings

fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt

they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid.

By asking ‘What does this mean?’, they express a wish that everything

be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite

a different response. One asks other things.”

This view is exactly opposite to the one that a student of communi­

cation receives at university, yet it is the very basis of communication.

Modern masters of information, such as the CIA and many politicians,

know full well that real power lies in what is not said, in what is not
spoken, and survival depends on making statements that are as multi­

faceted and ambiguous as permissible. Disclosing information, “com­

munication” as most people know it, can mean sure disaster as far

as these people are concerned. Yet the broadcast media, the students

of media, and many video artists continue to operate under the old

models, creating more and more boring works.

One of the most distressing changes taking place is in the area of

children’s toys. (It has become such a big business, infected with the

same ignorant greed as everything else.) Toys are becoming more and

The Porcupine and the Car 67

more “advanced,” loaded down with gadgets, gimmicks, buzzers, flash­

ing lights, and anything else manufacturers can think of to throw in.

Children are being robbed of their imaginations at a younger and

younger age. A block of wood can be anything from a boat to a

spaceship; it can change instantly into any form desired, and it does not

run on batteries. Observing how many people are being raised by this

culture, is hardly surprising when they come to a video art show they

are utterly confused and ask questions such as “What is this?” “Why

is this art?” and the familiar “What does this mean?”

Information storage and retrieval are other words for information

encoding and decoding. Humans seem to possess built-in decoders

which insist on deciphering or searching for meaning in (making sense

out of ) everything, including, as in Lilly’s case, nothing. Science has

been attempting to decode nature for thousands of years with still no

end in sight. Nature, herself the grand code, has consistently awed

scientists with her apparently intrinsic sense of purpose (teleology, as it

is called), supreme harmony, and interrelationships of parts and sys­

tems. It is indeed mysterious and beautiful that nature seems fully

aware and conscious of herself. Thorns on plants seem to acknowledge
the existence of hungry vegetarians; many flowers could not live apart

from bees any more than bees could live without them. The list is

endless. If one wants to make a jigsaw puzzle, one must first start with

a complete image, and then cut it up and hand the pieces to someone

saying “Here, put this together.” The participant, working backwards

into the system, has the point of view that he or she is creating this

image bit by bit, building it up from nothing piece by piece until all
the parts fit together into one whole.

The act of encoding information is the act of arranging elements

into a pattern, putting intelligence, purpose, or intent into something.

The act of decoding (retrieval) is to extract that organization out of the

pattern, sensing the intent or intelligence behind the organization of

that pattern. People are essentially doing this when they are watching

films and videotapes. Even for artists who claim that they are not at
all interested in content or information, this phenomenon still occurs.

Unfortunately, for many video artists, this skill of building intelligence

into their pieces is not really advanced in comparison with some of the

68 The Porcupine and the Car

natural systems, or even with the work of great artists and directors in

other media. So much of video art is simply an underestimation of the

level of visual literacy, or decoding ability, of the audience.

One of the most exciting, and frustrating, aspects of video tech­

nology is that it is changing all the time. The hardware is in a contsant

state of transformation and so-called improvement. Two important

recent developments are greatly affecting the area of work that has

come to be called video art. First is video games; in this current craze

we find an interesting phenomenon which concerns the information

encoding and decoding processes just described. Video games represent
the first widespread implementation of those amazing interactive

computer graphic display devices we were told about ten years ago. In

function, at least superficially, they fulfill a dream of interactive visual

art envisioned originally by the pioneering artists/ engineers who

developed the first video synthesizers. Quite a few of these individuals,

Stephen Beck and Bill Etra among them, are currently designing video

games and interactive devices for large Californian electronics firms. As

personal users gain more experience with these interactive machines,

we can see a new group of champions emerging. Watching one of these

video games “champions” in action, it becomes apparent that they are
decoding the computer program that someone has designed for the

machine. They approach the program from the opposite direction,

reconstructing it bit by bit until they have memorized most of the

patterns and branches (possible patterns) encoded into the machine.

They know, for example, that if they shoot the last man in the top row

right, a certain sequence will be triggered and appear on the screen, or

that after exactly 14 shots a bonus spaceship will appear and travel

across from left to right. Then, when they have finally deciphered most

of it, the play becomes mechanical and boring, so they simply move

on to a different game. It would be entertaining to arrange a meeting

between the users and the game’s original programmer. If asked, some

of these expert players could perhaps write out most of the original

program, although not exactly in the same technical language in which

it was written.

The second recent arrival on the video scene, the home video

recorder, has enabled far more artists to work in the medium by

The Porcupine and the Car 69

spreading low-cost equipment around. It has also eliminated a belief

that plagued the early days of video as it did early photography: that

someone could be considered a “video artist” simply because they had

got hold of the equipment at a stage when it was still scarce. Certainly

the initial energy and excitement of the video scene 10 years ago could

support a lot of this “just tape everything” kind of work, but it carried

on far longer than necessary. The medium is becoming more pedestrian

and less mystical and glamorous, striking a blow to the power-point of

many so-called artists. With this development, however, the potential

for individual creative expression is becoming greater.

These two recent developments represent the first shift in con­

sciousness for the average person away from considering their television

as something that brings them news, sports, and entertainment pro­

grams. This is just the beginning. Experimental systems are already in

operation where the TV screen becomes a data terminal, bringing not

only news, sports, and entertainment programs, but also teletype news­

wire services, stock-market reports, all the information in the public

library stored frame by frame, information monitoring of home heating

and electrical systems, and even bank account statements. This is all

“video,” and all vastly different from “I Love Lucy” or “Bonanza,” and

the addition of a personal microprocessor and video disc to this system

quickly multiplies the possibilities. John Baldessari, one of the early

video artists from California, once said that video is “like a pencil. Art

is just one of the things you can do with it.” Today video seems closer

in analogy to paper, a huge blank sheet upon which any number of

vastly different things can take place. Art is just one of the things you
can do with it.

Video as a pencil. Video as paper. The tools and our metaphors for

them are continually changing, but one thing remains more or less the

same: the person using these tools. This will probably never change.

Most people today do not know the creative possibilities of a pencil and

paper any more than a person 100 years from now will know what to

do with a digital color video camera. Attending the countless confer­
ences, demonstrations, and video expos can only convince one that the

technology is far ahead of the people using it. The limits are more in

the user than in the tools. If technology were frozen right now, it would

70 The Porcupine and the Car

take years for us to catch up with and use the technology at our

disposal and to realize its fullest potential. The manufacturers, avidly

promoting fashion, consumerism, and market competition, subvert our
desire to understand by releasing a steady stream of new models, new

designs, and generally orchestrating obsolescence. For some reason,

many video artists have also fallen prey to this propaganda of high

fashion and mystique in advanced technology: “If only I had this new
camera, this latest VTR, then I would really make good video art.”

Technology always seems to lead us away from ourselves. Rumi,

the Persian Sufi poet and mystic, wrote in 1273, “New organs of per­

ception come into being as a result of necessity-therefore, increase your
necessity so that you may increase your perception.” The real work

of the contemporary video artist, then, after acquiring the necessary

technical skills, is in the development and understanding of the self.

This is where the really hard work is. The level of use of the tools is
a direct reflection of the level of the user. Chopsticks can either be a

simple eating utensil or a deadly weapon, depending on who uses them.

Last summer, while shooting video on Mt. Rainier in Washington

State, I had a very instructive experience. We were coming down a

winding mountain road late one night, when we encountered a

large porcupine crossing the road. Fortunately, I spotted him in

enough time to stop the car a short distance from where he was

standing. We watched him in the bright lights of the car, standing

there petrified at this terrifying “close encounter of the third kind.”

Then, he started to do a strange thing. He began to turn around

and around in his place, his sharp quills rising off his body, and

emitting a kind of hissing sound. He didn’t run away. I realized this

dance was actually a move of self-defense. I cut the high-beam

headlights of the car to normal, but he continued to move around

more furiously. I then cut the lights further to the parking beams,

and when he still continued turning around I finally had to kill the

lights completely and turn off the engine so as not to give him a

heart attack. We watched him in the dim moonlight as he stopped

his dance and finally moved off the road. I realized at that time

that he was probably walking proudly away thinking how he really

The Porcupine and the Car 71

gave it to that big, blinding, noisy thing that came lumbering after

him out of the night. I’m sure he was inflated with confidence, so

pleased with himself that he had won, and certainly would have

quite a story to tell when he got home.

72 The Porcupine and the Car

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