In the beginning Viola organized his short works as “Songs,” explorative suites that equated time-based video with musical structures and acoustical phenomena. In The Space Between the Teeth (1977), part of Four Songs, a man at the end of a long hall successively screams, only to be approached at high speed by a terrifying zoom shot. Here, the transition between emotion and mechanics is obliterated. In Truth Through Mass Individuation (1976), disturbances caused by an individual in a cityscape are poetically unified, then given over to the greater social order. Time compresses around a blue vase in The Morning After the Night of Power, a segment from Memory Surfaces and Mental Prayers (1977), until its very stillness becomes a liberating activity. Sweet Light (1977) takes our quest for knowledge and perception and turns it into an all-consuming flood of illumination. For Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat) (1979), Viola traveled from the sweltering Tunisian desert to the frigid prairies of Saskatchewan. Light bends and distorts in the summer vapor, creating uncertainties of perception, while the drastic contrasts of winter light cause an equal measure of unreliable vision.