Bill Viola Quotes

I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.

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

Sensual is everything that refers to the delight of the senses. And that's what artists do, is stimulate the senses in any possible way.

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

Pictures are as evocative to me as smells.

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.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

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

I'm constantly being visually stimulated.

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

I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.

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

The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body.

We can see every square metre of the planet on Google Earth. But there is no substitute for that sensory experience of going out into the world and discovering things for yourself.

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.

I think sighted people let their eyes cheat them out of certain things. People who can see don't have a great sense of smell because they don't use it.

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

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.

I want to make music three-dimensional. I want to make a song also a painting, and a painting also a culinary experience.

You don't need to be a performer in order to dive into the sensory experience of music. Simply get as close as you can to the source of the music.

I think being deaf gave me an increased sense of sight.

Everyone makes sexy sounds; relatively few, sexy sights.

You wish to see; listen. Hearing is a step toward Vision.

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong.

We are less convinced by what we hear than by what we see.