Video Black - Ashley Cross

In Viola’s Video Black there is a constant emphasis on how a body perceives the world through sight. What is real or true is constantly changing and dependent on the context with which a reproduced image is made and, in turn, viewed. Security cameras act as an all-seeing eye for a specific, fixed point in space. It can record hundreds of thousands of hours of footage though it lacks a greater context and the information will inevitably be destroyed once the camera is no longer of use. Paintings acted as a form of iconography for religious purposes, creating a difference perception of space based on a spirituality that took priority above a reproduction of what the eye can see. With new technology, reproducing the perspective a painter experiences changes the perception of the work to something more collaborative.

Where it starts talking about how looking into the eye as a way to understand the oneself as well as the “other” is where it lost me. Understanding one’s own existence through the reflection one makes within the pupil of someone else could be enlightening, but I fail to see how it can make someone understand something as fundamentally different as “the other.”

The camera as an eye is an interesting concept because it can see as we can and we ascribe human-like habits to its functions such as consciousness, sleep, and death. The void that comes with a black screen being described as a heavy thing to succumb to is both familiar and frightening.