2.2. Pneuma

Pneuma is a visual installation created by Bill Viola in 1994, comprising three black and white videos projected into the corners of a room so as to construct a continuum filling the environment. Dissatisfied with the first effect, Viola produced a second version the following year, adding white noise modulated in amplitude. In 2004 he collaborated with the sound designer Mikhail Sandgren to create a third, definitive version featuring a specially composed ‘soundtrack’.

The videos have a contrapuntal structure: modulations in luminosity, definition, gestures and subjects succeed one another and are reflected back from the various sides of the room, creating a slow, continuously changing stream. The work can be divided up into several sections: the images projected onto the three corners do not coincide, even if they are often analogous, and there are occasional moments when all three screens are blank. In composing the soundtrack Viola and Sandgren adopted multiple layers of noise with different connotations of timbre, register and texture, taken from both concrete and electronic sources and modulated in a continuum that changes in quality and intensity. There is no exact link between the evolution of sound and images (constituting the audiovisual matrix, which may or may not be perceived by the viewer): the work is not based on synchronism and does not have a synaesthetic character, relying on the correspondence of the senses. Although the evolutions in timbre evoke the general progression of the images, from luminosity to their recognisability/noise, there are no synchronies or deterministic associations: the sound creates a counterpoint with the images to set up a continuous respiration made up of parallel processes which may or may not be in synch. The various independent parts are coordinated in a polyphony endowed with broad formal sections featuring crescendi and decrescendi, consonances and dissonances, sub-sections and so on. See Table 1 at the end of the text for an analysis of the first section of Pneuma.

The layers of noise are constructed with great care. They begin and end gradually, so as not to impinge on the viewer’s attention and elicit conscious listening; instead, they act on subliminal cognition. Viewers do not listen to the sound actively; indeed they are probably not even aware of the different qualities of the noise layers. The noise is used to ‘compress’ the viewers both psychologically and occasionally even physically, not to represent an object or an action. Each layer possesses its own characteristics of timbre and texture; sometimes there appears to be a concrete source, such as the wind, a jet of water, underwater sounds etc.; but the allusion is hardly ever clear or specific.

Instead each layer contains ‘spatial’ information and ‘tactile’ properties which are perceived unconsciously in a non-mediated manner: spaces which are grainy/continuous, static/dynamic, high/low, dense/rarefied, far/near, large/small, violent/relaxed, smooth/rough, annoying/pleasing etc. While not heard in a conscious manner, these properties are cognitively registered by the viewers who then project their own experiences, memories of similar sound environments and impulses from their subconscious onto them. Rather than simply composing layers of sound, Viola and Sandgren create interior sound spaces which evoke something different in each viewer. On one hand the noise drives the viewer into a particular emotional sphere; on the other it acts as a screen, an empty space imbued with a limitless semiotic potential which is activated by means of an introspective process that throws up recondite and unconscious mnestic traces. This is why it is impossible to identify the specific sound source: rather than depicting the objects it alludes to, it evokes the unknowable and mysterious.

Like that of The Ring, the soundtrack of Pneuma possesses multimodal features: the sound is constructed by means of techniques of subliminal manipulation of perception, which act on the body and on the viewer’s emotional sphere. However, the two works represent two different forms of construction of immersion: the film conjures up a hyper-realistic scenario, while in the video installation viewers are brought face to face with themselves. The Ring triggers sensations and emotions which are moulded down to the smallest detail, leaving no scope for the individual, while in Pneuma it is a question of activating the viewer’s mind and triggering introspective processes which reveal the unknowable, mystery, subconscious, fears and attachments, cultural archetypes, the individual with a specific past and relationship with the world. Thus in The Ring the mind adopts a passive role and is manipulated; in Pneuma, on the contrary, it is enhanced, stimulated to rediscover its most secret recesses, induced to prevail over the body.