The poetics of the gaze in Bill Viola's video art – I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51359/2763-8693.2025.267238Keywords:
Bill Viola, video art, visual culture, anthropocentrism, alterityAbstract
This article analyzes Bill Viola’s video I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), focusing on the aesthetic and narrative strategies that shape its poetics. The work interrogates the relationship between human and animal vision, destabilizing the anthropocentric hierarchies that have historically structured visual culture. The analysis dialogues with the theoretical contributions of Laura Mulvey (1983) and John Berger (2003), articulating the regimes of visibility that sustain gender and species domination. The text also mobilizes Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Rosalind Krauss' (2008) reflection on the aesthetics of narcissism in video art. Through this work, Bill Viola proposes a sensitive reflection on alterity and self-knowledge. The video thus becomes an expanded field of reflection on the limits of perception and the possibility of defamiliarizing the gaze.
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