Bill Viola Quotes

Many people mistakenly think a new technology cancels out an old one.

Digital technology is the same revolution as adding sound to pictures and the same revolution as adding color to pictures. Nothing more and nothing less.

Through all aspects of society be it art, design, the financial markets, government, technology or communications we are witnessing unprecedented global transformation - the result of which is impossible to predict.

Synergy is the VCR of media right now - discredited, outdated and left behind.

It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.

New forms of media - first movies, then television, talk radio and now the Internet - tend to challenge traditional codes of conduct. They flout convention, shake up the status quo and sometimes provoke outrage.

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.

Radio killed variety and TV killed radio, and the internet will kill television and it will go on and on.

I think what we have to do is figure out how to make sure we get the benefits of improved technology and yet cope with the dislocation that it will inevitably produce in certain industries.

I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.

When we talk about technology, often, we talk about the fact that it's going to be cool; it's going to do all these things for us. But at the same time, technology will deeply change our societies.

The invention of gas and electric heaters has not meant the end of fireplaces. Printing did not end penmanship, television did not kill radio, movies did not kill theatre, and home videos did not kill movie theaters, although all these things were falsely predicted.

The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.

The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.

I'm not sure when the New Media will replace the Old Media, but it will be sooner than later.

I was a consultant for Kodak back in the late 80's. There were engineers there who told me that in the future, most photographs would be taken on telephones. They weren't able to do anything with that. They were engineers, not management.

The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg's press did the Middle Ages.

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.

I think this is the kind of thing where we're rapidly moving toward an age where most of the populace will be almost unable to imagine life without an Internet component interlocked with it.

A digital camera does have many advantages and I was a believer that digital video would be a big influence on film-making.

Ever since I first used a computer in the early '80s, I've thought of it as a fundamentally new medium for the dissemination of ideas which can transform people's lives and the society we live in.

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.