James Turrell Quotes

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.

You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film.

I use visual perception as a way of bringing people into my space.

I often avoid using the terms 'figuration' and 'abstraction' because I've always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting - you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.

Light is something that can really change your perception of space.

I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.

I'm not really interested in creating things to be seen inside a private gallery. I'm interested in creating things that are all around us, that engage us. I just find the things that I respond to are useful.

I don't want you looking at the light fixture; I want you looking at where light goes. But more than that, I'm interested in the effect of light upon you and your perceptions.

Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel.

As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful; and the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.

The instant the atmosphere is illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colours assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a lodestone, of these images.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

Some of the best rock shows I ever saw were those appealing to all your senses.

Just as there is no substitute for original works of art, there is no substitute for the world of direct sensual experience.

Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.

I'll put candles all over the room, then light then, and get to it. I call it my 'vibe in a bag.'

Light is architectural. It is sculptural.

Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development. Deprivation experiments demonstrate that neural connections can be modulated by environmental influences during a critical period of postnatal development.

There are things you can get in that physical experience you cannot get virtually.

I've always seen my movies in particular as being an immersive experience. I mean, with the technology at my disposal, I've always tried to make them as immersive an experience as possible.

We're made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel colour, and experience it.

People don't realize that lighting can change the whole look of a place and the feel.

The concept and vision of 'Electronic Nature' is to give my fans a fully immersive sensory experience of music, visuals and more.

Depending on how I'm feeling that day or the music I'm listening to, I will pick appropriate lighting to help create the atmosphere for me. I use a lot of blues and purples.