Jointly explores Bill Viola’s video art and Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation through their shared understanding of the interpenetration of nature and technology
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Expands the study of Viola’s art beyond aesthetics and beyond representation
Situates Viola’s aesthetic practice in relation to Simondon’s theory of individuation, and his philosophy of nature and technology
Emphasises the dimension of Viola as technical innovator - the artist-technician
Provides a thorough analysis of 18 major Viola works and discusses the cinematic significance of his art
Makes Simondon’s philosophy accessible by reference to the specific analysis of Viola’s art
Both Viola and Simondon prioritise a techno-aesthetic experience that reveals a consistent pattern of interdependence between form and matter, nature and culture, human and nonhuman. Inspired by Simondon’s ideas on individuation as process, and by other major figures of process philosophy such as Raymond Ruyer, Deleuze and Guattari, and Brian Massumi, Elena del Río delves deep into Viola’s art and finds a politics of nature that is also a politics of the affects. In taking full account of the interrelation between collective affects and living milieus, this politics exceeds the still anthropocentric project of a politics reductively focused on environmental degradation.
The book works with a broad concept of ecology that encompasses a nature-culture continuum - from Simondon’s associated milieu to Guattari’s tripartite ecological praxis, from Deleuze and Guattari’s existential territories to Massumi’s affective events. Attending to this nature-culture continuum and activating our collective energies are prime strategies in tackling the overwhelming psycho-social and environmental crises we face.
Part I: Nature’s Gestures 1. Aesthetic Gestures in the Animal-/Nature-Continuum 2. Artful Politics of Nature
Intermezzo: Video and the Digital Convergence
Part II: More-than-Human Ecologies 3. Affective Ecologies, a People to Come 4. Electronic Water, Figures of Submersion 5. Disaster Ecologies, Collective Individuation 6. Mental Ecologies, Transversal Cinema
Techno-Ecologies of Bill Viola and Gilbert Simondon by Elena del Río is a beautifully crafted and timely exploration of the dynamic interplay between art, technology, and ecology. By weaving together Bill Viola’s immersive video installations and Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, del Río illuminates how techno-ecologies redefine our understanding of existence, ecological interconnectedness, and collective transformation. A must-read for anyone seeking to grasp the creative potential of these intersections.
Powerful and precise, del Río's new book asks us to rethink nothing less than the techno-aesthetic processes through which we come into being. Here the wondrous experimentations of artist-technician Bill Viola stand as an antidote to the violence of instrumental reason and the extractive drive of our image economy. A most timely intervention.
Reading Viola and Simondon together, del Río formulates two bold and marvelous propositions: video (and by extension, cinema) belongs to nature, and the camera is a philosophical system. Her book lives up to the challenge of these propositions, offering luminous readings of Viola videoworks while upending received understandings of nature and culture, technology and ecology.
Bill Viola’s video works give a sense of being in the presence of an ever-expanding infinite—as in his works where imperceptibly slow movement, rather than grasping the visible world, renders the field of vision even more infinite. While Viola’s great body of work is often interpreted as religious or mystical, Elena del Rio argues convincingly that the infinite presence palpable in his work is an infinity immanent to this world: an ever-changing individuation in rhythm with the humans, machines, and other entities that compose it.
Elena del Río is Professor Emerita of Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her essays on the intersections between cinema and philosophies of the body in the areas of technology, performance, and affect have been featured in journals such as Alphaville, Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Deleuze Studies, Discourse, Film-Philosophy, Image and Narrative, Necsus, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Science Fiction Studies, Studies in French Cinema, and SubStance. She has also contributed to numerous edited volumes on the films of Atom Egoyan, Michael Haneke, and Rainer Fassbinder, and on topics such as Asian exploitation film, cinema and cruelty, the philosophy of film and new media, film noir, film phenomenologies, and Deleuze and cinema. She is the author of The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
