Bill Viola Quotes

Dawn and sunset are the times when Nature herself is unstable and in flux. The nocturnal world and the daytime world are meeting, and for a brief time coexisting. It's not a neat hard cut, but a blurred, irregular dissolve. These moments are the seams in existence through which we can get a glimpse of the deeper, fundamentally random, chance workings of a system in which we are only a small, insignificant player.

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

I came of age at the end of the 1960s, just when video was also coming into the world. Companies such as Sony and Panasonic were starting to market it and we artists immediately knew how it could be used.

There is a big push that we all are engaged in, in wanting to have the newest in innovation - and I think that's all really great. But I also feel that human beings need to be aware of, and grounded in, history.

The fundamental aspect of video is not the image, even though you can stand in amazement at what can be done electronically, how images can be manipulated and the really extraordinary creative possibilities. For me the essential basis of video is the movement - something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment.

Video artists being at the low end of the totem pole economically, one of the ways we survive is to go around showing work and giving these talks.

The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image.

I think we're in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items - Jackson Pollock used house paint - to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil paint and acrylic paint.

The velocity and knee-jerk response to events happening in real time that television brings us precludes any kind of reflection or contemplation and therefore analysis. And that's been one of the greatest political dangers in the post-war era. The idea of the reasoned, thoughtful response goes out of the window.

I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.

The world is fine and everything is normal and then, bang, you just get bowled over by the wrathful deities somehow. That happens in very small ways and happens in very large ways when you have a major conflagration in the world. It's another cycle of existence of human beings.

If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.

Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity ... but there's a feeling that life is interconnected, that there's life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren't sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don't cry: you scream, you try to run. When it's over and you're OK, that's when you cry.

You can always tell in a movie when they are setting you up for something. If someone leaves an important object on the table and walks away, the camera will have some way of indicating that to you.

Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It's no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time.

Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.

When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional - a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful.

The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

Live your Art. Don't think about it.

I hope we'll be able to see that in our lifetime: the end of the camera! When I'm in Paris, I'll buy a big bottle of champagne and I'll save it for that day, for the day when they'll be no more camera.

I cry a lot. Usually once a day. I think it's one of the most profound forms of human expression.

Fifty years from now I don't think optical realism is going to be an issue in visual communication any more. Experience is so much richer than light falling on your retina. You embody a microcosm of reality when you walk down the street - your memories, your varying degrees of awareness of what's going on around you, everything we could call the contextualizing information. Representing that information is going to be the main issue in the years ahead - how the world meets the mind, not the eye.

I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.

I don't believe in originality in art. I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We're always borrowing.

Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.

Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

Human beings have always been creative. The guys who were making the pyramids.. and archaeological research has showed us this.. had little figurines made by the workers, to express their devotion to their god.