Déserts was created to accompany a live performance of the work of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (1885-1965). The Ensemble Modern, a contemporary music group based in Frankfurt, commissioned Viola to create a visual score for Varèse's Déserts after discovering notes by the composer referring to an unrealized image component of his composition. The resulting film/videotape was produced with the European television stations ZDF/Arte. In October 1994 Viola's Déserts premiered in a live performance in Vienna with conductor Peter Eötvös and the Ensemble Modern. Viola's images are a stunning collage, ranging from the desolate landscape of the Great Salt Lake to the sea floor. Varèse's composition uses taped sound collages that interrupt the live music, and Viola visually develops this structure. The editing together of visual and score is immaculate; bolts of lightning hit on the bass line, a series of field fires rise in intensity following the adagio of the music. Images of rising and falling, the two great motifs of Viola's work, are present here. In one stunning sequence a table is overturned, and bowls and jugs fall in slow motion. Spinning, they disgorge their contents in amazing fractal like patterns.