Bill Viola

Bill Viola’s Anthem is structured around a scream emitted by an eleven-year-old girl as she stands beneath the engine shed at Union Station in Los Angeles.  Her shriek, only a few seconds in duration, reverberates off the shed’s brick walls.  Viola has slowed, stretched, modulated, and otherwise altered the sound of the girl’s voice to create the soundtrack for a disturbing post-industrial city symphony that is, in Viola’s words, “. . . centered on the theme of primitive fear of the dark, materialism and the harmful separation of body and mind”.