"Lucid and transfixing, Bill Viola's feature-length I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like reaffirms his preeminence among the video artists of his generation. A homegrown seer who long ago eschewed special effects, Viola is the author of visionary documentaries that, unsentimental and unprogrammatic as they are, somehow make mysticism seem material. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, which was designed for video projection, is 89 minutes of mysteriously straightforward zoological observations.... Viola's mode of address is strictly species to species.... (He establishes) a sense of brute, prehistoric existence-buffalo tranquilly graze and piss on some shimmering prairie. Periodically, Viola zooms in on one ancient, reproachful eye, flooding the screen with inexplicable, reproachful being...the mega-close-up (is the) operative principle.... Viola turns himself into a creature as well.... Like the ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner, Viola takes the visionary-romantic tradition of the New American Cinema into new territory, geographical and otherwise. As its title (taken from the Rig Veda) suggests, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like expresses a yearning for a reality beyond the senses, and outside history...(He is) striving to touch the primitive bedrock of experience. There's an electronic charge between those animal eyes and ours." J. Hoberman, Village Voice