It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.
BILL VIOLAIt only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.
More Bill Viola Quotes
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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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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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Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.
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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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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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I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
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I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
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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.
BILL VIOLA