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.
BILL VIOLAWhen 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.
More Bill Viola Quotes
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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.
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It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.
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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.
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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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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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Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.
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I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.
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There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
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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.
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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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I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
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Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
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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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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.
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We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.
BILL VIOLA