Further Research

Bill Viola
Bill Viola was born in 1951 and has worked in the establishment of video for 40 years. His work has
been a vital part of expanding contemporary art in terms of technology and content. Viola has
breached out into several different art forms for example videotapes, architectural video
installations, and sound environments, electronic music performances flat panel video pieces and
works for television broadcasts. Viola is specifically well known for his state-of-the-art video
installations. If you go to a Bill Viola gallery, you can expect to see video installations with total
environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound that are well though through but carry
direct simplicity.

Bill Viola is one of the rare artists to have worked principally with the moving image since 1972,
testing various means of technology equipment to project his work. The portapak was used
massively in the 1960s, a black and white video recorder. Viola has also used

https://www.forbes.com/sites/yjeanmundelsalle/2015/01/01/american-video-artist-bill-viola-has-
been-reinventing-reality-for-the-past-40-years/#22dcd4954805

https://www.forbes.com/sites/yjeanmundelsalle/2015/01/01/american-video-artist-bill-viola-has-
been-reinventing-reality-for-the-past-40-years/#22dcd4954805

Douglas Gordon.

Douglas Gordon, born 20 September 1966 is a Scottish artist specialising in video installation.

Much of Gordon's work is seen as being about memory and uses repetition in various forms.
He uses material from the public realm and also creates performance-based videos. His
work often overturns traditional uses of video by playing with time elements and employing
multiple monitors.

Monster, 1996-7, colour photograph by Douglas Gordon, Private ownership- Michael Hue
Williams

Gordon has often reused older film footage in his photographs and videos. One of his best-
known art works is 24 Hour Psycho (1993) which slows down Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho
so that it lasts twenty four hours.

Play Dead; Real Time was filmed at an empty Gagosian Gallery in New York, where the artist
arranged to have Minnie, a four-year-old Indian elephant, brought in to perform a series of
tricks play dead, stand still, walk around, back up, get up and beg on the
command of her off-screen trainer. The footage showing Minnies sequences of tricks is
simultaneously presented in a front and a rear life-sized projection and on a monitor, with
each one depicting the same event from a range of perspectives.

Play Dead; Real Time' (2003) (included in the ARTIST ROOMS collection) presents two videos
on large screens, each showing the performance of a series of memorised actions (what we
might in another context call tricks) by a trained circus elephant.

http://www.artistrooms.org/artists/douglas-gordon

The Lumiere Brothers.

Worked for their fathers manufacturing plate business Antoine. In 1980.

the Kinetoscope could only show a motion picture to one individual viewer, Antoine urged Auguste
and Louis to work on a way to project film onto a screen, where many people could view it at the
same time.

Cinmatographe. The Cinmatographe photographed and projected film at a speed of 16 frames per
second, much slower than Edisons device (48 frames per second), which meant that it was less noisy
to operate and used less film. A three-in-one device that could record, develop and project motion
pictures, the Cinmatographe would go down in history as the first viable film camera.

This landmark event was a presentation of 10 short films of approximately 50 seconds each. Their
directorial debut was La sortie des usines Lumire (Workers leaving the Lumire Factory).

There was another short film arrival of a train a la ciotat (1986) The train arrives from a distant
point and bears down on the viewer, finally crossing the lower edge of the screen. It was filmed by
Louis and Auguste Lumire.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/9618679/The-Lumiere-
Brothers-celebrating-the-first-light-in-the-motion-picture-industry.html