Bill Viola, Celebrated Video Artist Who Played With Time, Dies at 73

Bill Viola, an artist who brought a timeless-seeming sense of beauty and age-old spirituality to the newfangled genre of video art, becoming one of the medium’s most influential and popular artists, died on Friday at his home in Long Beach, Calif. He was 73.

The cause was complications of early onset Alzheimer’s disease, said Kira Perov, his wife, studio director and artistic collaborator.

When artists were just beginning to work with video in the early 1970s, Mr. Viola quickly earned a reputation as a technical wizard adept at the new recording and editing methods. Many of his early works reflected a fascination with special effects, including input-output feedback loops to fill a screen with visual distortions and closed-circuit surveillance installations. He gained experience in the technology through jobs as an audiovisual assistant in museums and galleries.

Increasingly, his interest in Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism shaped his choices as an artist, and the exhilaration of tinkering with video technology gave way to using it to explore the power of human consciousness, with its illusion of a perpetual present tense. Many of his most powerful works slow down the passage of time so that viewers become keenly aware of their own physical presence and thoughts.

Mr. Viola sometimes took on explicitly religious subjects. In 1983, he created an installation, “Room for St. John of the Cross,” with video and sound that evoke the tiny cell where John, a 16th-century Spanish mystic, wrote ecstatic poetry despite being tortured for months.