Bill Viola Quotes

Bill Viola — American Artist born on January 25, 1951,

Bill Viola is a contemporary video artist whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in New Media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness... (wikipedia)

When you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body. There's light, there's sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There's loud roaring sound happening.

Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren't sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don't cry: you scream, you try to run. When it's over and you're OK, that's when you cry.

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.

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 there's a feeling that life is interconnected, that there's life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.

Bill Viola Quotes

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