Bill Viola’s figures of submersion as techniques of transindividual affect
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article seeks to establish a fundamental continuity between distinctive periods in Bill Viola’s work. Examining two relatively early works—The Reflecting Pool (1977–79) and The Passing (1991)—and the more recent piece Self Portrait, Submerged (2013), I consider the artist’s physical presence as a catalyst for an inherent continuity between early formalism and the intense affectivity of the later period. Affect and its transindividual energies were present in Viola even before they came to acquire a more explicit articulation in the 2000s and beyond. We see in Viola’s work a merging of artist and artwork which drastically departs from traditional notions of authorial autonomy and mediation, giving rise instead to an event of transindividual affect. I consider the merging of artist and artwork here in light of Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, a process-oriented ontology remarkably resonant with Viola’s art. I rely on Simondon’s concepts of the technical object, the preindividual and the transindividual, to examine: first, Viola’s immanent, transductive relation to his medium as illustrated in The Reflecting Pool; second, the way in which the artist’s participatory witnessing of technological ontogenesis transmutes into a directly affective experience in The Passing; and finally, the confluent affectivity of artist and spectator in Self Portrait, Submerged.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".