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Immortal kombat
29 December 2002

Bill Viola's The Greeting

His work has always been spiritual, but Bill Viola has now set the ultimate test: can you find God in a computer game?

Take a walk to St John of the Cross, make a right at the Koran and turn left at the Lotus Sutra," says Bill Viola matter-of-factly, sitting in his workshop in San Francisco. The internationally acclaimed video artist might
have sounded like he was giving directions to a tourist attraction via an eccentric collection of London pubs, but he was in fact describing his latest digital art project.

The Night Journey, a computer-game-based artwork in which the player travels through seven richly designed cosmic landscapes on a path towards spiritual enlightenment, keeps with the traditional video-game format: it's interactive, follows a classic multilevel navigation structure and is built for the personal computer. But the similarities stop there. Unlike most games, which demand the user to stampede at warp speed to Level 10 while zapping aliens, Viola's contribution to the multi-billion-dollar gaming industry is doggedly counterintuitive.

For one thing, spirituality is not a common theme for video games. But contemporary artists such as Viola are exploring new ways of putting people in touch with their spiritual side. They are drawing upon the history,
architecture and expression of religious faith and presenting the results to today's largely secular audiences.

The Night Journey invites gamers to immerse themselves in religious texts, sounds and images from a variety of faiths while travelling through seven levels, echoing the seven heavens of the Aristotelian cosmological system. At the end of the road lies self-annihilation, as the player leaps into a candle flame. Surrounded by the writings of such historical figures as Rumi, Shankara and St Antony, gamers can idle their time in Viola's cosmos, taking in images of Persian illuminated manuscripts or St John of the Cross's poetry on their way to nirvana.

For a moment, Viola's eyes glint wickedly at the thought of young players tearing their way through his new game as if it were Doom. But his ideal player is someone who adopts a more reflective and meditative approach. "It's about slowing down," says Viola. "If you look at the world of the game simply as a space to get out of, it's like kids playing in a museum; they run past the paintings and miss everything."

Slowing down is what the New York-born and California-based Viola has been trying to get people to do throughout his 30-year car-eer. From such early experiments as Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (1982), where the artist videotaped himself confined in a room for three days, to The Passions
(2002), a large-scale, slow-motion exploration of human emotions, which opens at the Getty Museum in LA next month, before travelling to London's National Gallery in the autumn, Viola's limpid digital canvases suspend the viewer in time. "The experience of Viola's installations is closer to that of floating under water than to watching a film," says David Ross, who curated Viola's 1998-2000 touring retrospective.

Viola's installations aim to elicit a non-intellectual, bodily response in the viewer. Brought up as an Episcopalian, Viola doesn't now adhere to any formal religion and cites influences as varied as the 13th-century Islamic mystic Rumi and the early Christian mystic St John of the Cross. He has long felt a connection with religious mysticism. "All of the major faiths in the world have a mystical branch. What unifies them is the idea of the individual going one-on-one with God," he says.

His goal for The Night Journey is to create a one-on-one relationship between the gamer and the computer screen to match that between the mystics and their gods. In short, he plans to turn the cold plastic box of the desktop computer into a sacred space.

Art has been used for thousands of years to depict religious themes, but as organised religion has become less prevalent, the relationship between religion and art has become largely based on tourism. Yet modern art has parallels with religion. "Contemporary art is often difficult to understand," says Benjamin Weil, new media curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "Like religion, you have to surrender to the idea of
not understanding it."

Perhaps because of its heightened ability to elicit a visceral, rather than intellectual response in the viewer, video art is creeping into church crypts all over the country and abroad. Leading digital artists Nam June Paik and Marie Jo Lafontaine have both had works presented in places of worship. Earlier this year, James Cattell, a young British artist, created a video and sound installation, 18:1-7, for Canterbury Cath-edral. Two screens
featuring video footage of a newborn baby formed a natural triptych with the altar in the crypt. Buddhist chants echoed around the space. Cattell is creating a video piece for Hampstead Church graveyard next spring.

Viola's work has also found a home in religious institutions. In 1996, the artist was commissioned to create The Messenger, a video and sound installation, for Durham Cathedral. Projected on a large screen mounted by the great west door of the church, The Messenger depicted a pale, naked, prostrate man, gradually rising to the surface of a deep body of water. In 1999, Viola's vibrantly coloured video and sound installation The Greeting, inspired by Pontormo's mannerist painting Visitation (1528-29), was installed at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral.

Cattell thinks video and sound installation works particularly well in old churches, where high-tech art meets ancient architecture. "What makes churches ideal for the sort of work I do is the architectural beauty and the
spiritual energy of them."

For such artists, places of worship add an extra layer of resonance, but their art does not necessarily espouse the religious doctrine of the institution in which the work is being presented. "Durham Cathedral is one of those places that is extremely impressive and deeply moving, no matter what your faith is," says Viola. His view is that the true power of art isin the hidden layers and subtexts: "Despite the term 'visual art', all works of art represent invisible things." He wants to create images "that address the body, not just the eye", but our lazy, television-fogged minds can only read images literally. Viola sees this as a particular problem in his native country. "It's ironic that the USA is capable of producing the highest quality image-making tools, but people have no perception below the surface," he says.

This image dyslexia poses a conundrum not just for Viola but for any visual artist with spiritual concerns working in a secular world. It's at the heart of such art-world crises as the fuss surrounding the 1997 Sensation! exhibition by young British artists. Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York, tried to stop the show from opening at the Brooklyn Museum of Art when he learnt about such works as Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary (1996), a painting of a black Madonna splattered with elephant dung. People couldn't see past the poo; insulted by what they perceived on the surface, they couldn't relate to the artwork at any other level.

Moving spirituality away from religious institutions and onto a computer screen is one way to negotiate the murky relationship between formal religion, art and modern society. But will a spiritual-themed artwork in a
video-game package appeal to the gaming community, predominantly made up of teenage boys?

Otto Neumaier, a philosophy professor at Salzburg University who has written extensively about digital art, is doubtful: "I am curious and a little bit hesitant about whether people who like to play video games will accept the invitation to use them for spiritual experiences." Persuading gamers to accept The Night Journey might be even harder than persuading Giuliani to accept Ofili.