Born in 1951, and lives with his wife and collaborator Kira Perov in Long Beach, California. He graduated from the Experimental Studios at the College of Visual and Performing Arts, Syracuse University in 1973. In the mid 70’s he worked in Florence as the technical director of Art/Tapes/22, one of the first video art studios in Europe. He travelled widely to study and record traditional performing arts, plays, concerts and ceremonies, in, amongst others, the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali, and Japan. From 1973 to 1980, he worked together with the avant-garde composer David Tudor. In 1980, he and Kira lived in Japan where they studied new technology and Zen Buddhism from the master Daien Tanaka. In 1981, he became the first artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation’s Atsugi research laboratories, where he worked with the latest audio/visual technology. He also studied techniques of the medical depiction of the human body at the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center in 1983. In 1984, he began a long-term project devoted to the consciousness of animals. In 1994 he was invited by the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt to create a work based on Edgard Varèse’s music piece Déserts that is projected during concerts. In 1995, at the 46th Venice Biennale, he presented a new cycle of five installations Buried Secrets, including The Greeting, one of the first of the artist’s works inspired by painting. In 1998, he spent a year at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where he studied the expression of emotion in the art of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. A year later he began work on a three year project The Passions involving the participation of actors. In 2002, he created his first project using high-definition digital video, the cycle Going Forth By Day, inspired by Tuscan frescoes from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Most recently, in collaboration with theatre director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, he worked on a new adaptation of Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde, that had its premiere in Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2004, and fully staged at the Opéra Bastille in Paris in 2005.