Bill Viola
Bill Viola
Bill Violais 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMultimedia Artist
Date of Birth25 January 1951
CountryUnited States of America
mystical-experiences solitude visionaries
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.
thinking brain earth
The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.
inspiration writing
I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
paris bottles able
I hope we'll be able to see that in our lifetime: the end of the camera! When I'm in Paris, I'll buy a big bottle of champagne and I'll save it for that day, for the day when they'll be no more camera.
creative video fundamentals
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.
art thinking students
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.
thinking artist oil
I think we're in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items - Jackson Pollock used house paint - to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil paint and acrylic paint.
sides world surface
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.
running knives doctors
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.
dna light speed
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.
vision impression
It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.
art feelings experts
You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.
thinking keys intellectual
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.
coming experience lights loud physical pieces roaring sound
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.