PHILADELPHIA — When rereading a classic novel many years after college, one finds that greater maturity often deepens the experience, bringing more insight into the author’s objective. Recently, I had a similar reaction in viewing 10 videos of varying length, several for the second time, by the artist Bill Viola during a daylong marathon among three museums here. Engrossed in the humanistic spiritualism that permeates Mr. Viola’s work, blended with his idiosyncratic imagination about the activities of daily life, I emerged with a fresh understanding of how his representation of a singular instance stands for a timeless worldview of both people and nature.

Mr. Viola, 68, a New Yorker by birth and Californian since 1980, now lives in Long Beach with his wife and collaborator, Kira Perov. Coming from what he calls a TV childhood, he discovered video in 1969 when someone staged a video camera in his high school classroom. When he arrived at Syracuse University, he immediately signed up for the video workshop and has been experimenting and developing new techniques ever since in what was then a nascent art.

[Read about exhibitions in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City.]

In paving the way for video innovation, he has produced challenging art works based on medical imaging technologies of the human body and animal behavior as well as scripted moving scenarios filmed with performers. As proof that video is now mainstream in the art world, all four of the finalists on view for the 2018 Turner Prize, sponsored by Tate Britain, were practitioners of video art with digitally driven, hyper-political themes.