When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does. Bill Viola More Quotes by Bill Viola More Quotes From Bill Viola Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep. Bill Viola fast-pacedsoulworld 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. Bill Viola spacereflectionart 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. Bill Viola keysintellectualthinking 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. Bill Viola another-worldsidesworld People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church. Bill Viola museumspeopleart Live your Art. Don't think about it. Bill Viola artthinking 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. Bill Viola videoessentialscreative It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision. Bill Viola impressionvision You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art. Bill Viola expertsfeelingsart 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. Bill Viola believeartthinking 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. Bill Viola communicationmemoriesfall Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves. Bill Viola selflongart 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. Bill Viola just-beingtogetherart Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts. Bill Viola individualrevolutionheart There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it. Bill Viola invisibleworld 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. Bill Viola speeddnalight 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. Bill Viola studentsartthinking I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open. Bill Viola I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age. Bill Viola differentageforgotten 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. Bill Viola oceanwatermoving
