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" I cry a lot. Usually once a day. I think it's one of the most profound forms of human expression. "
Bill Viola
Day
Expression
Human
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" The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image. "
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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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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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Got
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Bad
" When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does. "
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Giving
Making
Structure
" Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic. "
Bill Viola
Think
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" 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. "
Bill Viola
Giving
End
Survive
" 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. "
Bill Viola
Soul
Wake Up
Live
" There is a big push that we all are engaged in, in wanting to have the newest in innovation - and I think that's all really great. But I also feel that human beings need to be aware of, and grounded in, history. "
Bill Viola
Great
Think
Innovation
" 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
Student
Late
" 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. "
Bill Viola
Myself
Say
Me
" 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
Earth
Think
Brain
" 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
Life
Work
Vision
" Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts. "
Bill Viola
Revolution
Starts
Hearts
" 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. "
Bill Viola
Culture
History
Character
" 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
Market
Starting
Used
" This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see. "
Bill Viola
Everything
Camera
Taught
" The velocity and knee-jerk response to events happening in real time that television brings us precludes any kind of reflection or contemplation and therefore analysis. And that's been one of the greatest political dangers in the post-war era. The idea of the reasoned, thoughtful response goes out of the window. "
Bill Viola
Political
Window
Time
" 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. "
Bill Viola
Knife
Me
Cry
" The fundamental aspect of video is not the image, even though you can stand in amazement at what can be done electronically, how images can be manipulated and the really extraordinary creative possibilities. For me the essential basis of video is the movement - something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment. "
Bill Viola
Creative
Changes
Stand
" 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. "
Bill Viola
Small
Normal
You
" 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
Experience
Beginning
Solitude
" I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age. "
Bill Viola
Different
Age
Would
" 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
Sometimes
Simple
Image