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.
BILL VIOLABecause we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
More Bill Viola Quotes
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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.
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There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
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I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
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The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.
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Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.
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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.
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You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.
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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.
BILL VIOLA