Bill Viola Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“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.”

“Video artists being at the low end of the totem pole economically, one of the ways we survive is to go around showing work and giving these talks.”

“When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does.”

“Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.”

“The future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to find out what was changed hundreds of years before.”

“If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.”

“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.”

“In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.”

“One of the most important things for me in terms of my working method is doubt. I get very insecure about my ideas. And I don't say 'insecure' in kind of a paranoid way. I mean just: 'Are they good enough?' 'Is this the right thing to do?' I really beat myself up over that.”

“The world is fine and everything is normal and then, bang, you just get bowled over by the wrathful deities somehow. That happens in very small ways and happens in very large ways when you have a major conflagration in the world. It's another cycle of existence of human beings.”