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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.

Bill Viola

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.
BILL VIOLA

Feelings Identity Interconnected Rocks Tree
There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
BILL VIOLA

Invisible Living World
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.
BILL VIOLA

Creative Devotion Express Guy Pyramids
We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.
BILL VIOLA

Call Death Metaphor Moment Ourselves
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

Art Hope Reflection Something Space
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

Brain Earth Honestly Thinking
I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
BILL VIOLA

Images Inspiration Writing
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

Art Change Students Thinking
Live your Art. Don’t think about it.
BILL VIOLA

Art Live Thinking
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.
BILL VIOLA

Experiences Mystical Solitude Wisdom
Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
BILL VIOLA

Fast Paced Soul World
It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.
BILL VIOLA

Impression Second Vision
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.
BILL VIOLA

Embody Everything Experience Memories Microsm Retina
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

Art Experts Feelings
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

Fragment might Simple Writing
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.
BILL VIOLA

Age Artist Coming Panasonic Video Year

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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