Just realized that folks have put some work online by one of my longtime favorite artists, Bill Viola (who is currently collaborating on a live opera that I’ll miss entirely, waaaah).
A lot of his work (this piece below included) is engaged wtih various questions or themes around medatative spirituality. See also the piece hanging temporarily on the home page here–in a gallery, it’s projected on a gigantic screen hung in the middle of the room, and takes about 10 minutes to do what you see in 30 seconds. The other side of the screen projects almost the exact same scene of immolation/union, except with fire instead of water. Yum.
Here’s a very old piece called “Migration.” It’s meant to go much slower than what you’re used to from YouTube. In a gallery, one finds that the slow pace of his stuff has exactly the effect of putting one in a calmer, more medatative headspace. His later stuff is incredibly painterly–videos that look like canvases and that move so slowly that you really have to enter the piece on its terms and abandon your own.
