El águila ediciones. Sección documental

What makes such an installation “poetic”? Is “poetic” just another epithet for “imaginative” or “moving” or “intense”? Or does Viola’s video have some more meaningful relation to “poetry”? My own take on this difficult question is that the attraction poetry has had for Viola is that it provides video with a turn away from the merely visual. “Traditionally in television,” he remarks, “fidelity has been to vision, to the visual image and not to reality, and rarely to the retinal image in the eyeball. . . . The human visual image is binocular, it includes overlapping areas, double images, indistinct edges, and only a very small part of the center, called the fovea, shows focus in rich detail. Of course, human software, the mind, integrates this with information from the other senses. . . . The camera only sees three faces of a cube, for example, yet our hands can tell us that the other three simultaneously exist”.

The poetic thus translates roughly as the other, the visionary–the missing piece in the puzzle, the fourth dimension that “normal” television can never convey. It is a surprisingly Romantic notion, as is Viola’s repeated insistence that, finally, video art must use the latest technology–hardware and software–to enhance the “development and understanding of the self.”