Bill Viola Quotations

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.

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 theres a feeling that life is interconnected, that theres life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

When you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body. There's light, there's sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There's loud roaring sound happening.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.

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.

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

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.

My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.

One of the most important things for me in terms of my working method is doubt. I get very insecure about my ideas. And I don't say 'insecure' in kind of a paranoid way. I mean just: 'Are they good enough?' 'Is this the right thing to do?' I really beat myself up over that.

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.

There's another world out there just beyond the world we're in. It's just on the other side of that translucent, semitransparent surface.

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

When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does.

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

Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.

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

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.

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

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.

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.

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 future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to find out what was changed hundreds of years before.

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.

In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

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.

There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.

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.

People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.

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

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

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.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

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.

Live your Art. Don't think about it.

Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.