Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.
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.
I feel like each time I do something I want it to be more and more recognizable that it's me so, by the time I do a film, my films will be as recognizable as someone like David Lynch or someone who's got their own thing going on.
I've always been interested with the idea of technology and the way technology affects our ability to communicate - our ability to have a rewarding experience with technology versus a kind of dehumanizing experience with technology.
The durational aspect of video art is very different from photography or sculpture. The idea of looping things interferes with that a little bit. It eliminates that finite viewing period which I think is not so expressive sometimes.
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.
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.
I'm a huge cinemaphile. My interest in filmmaking came out of experimenting with different genres, and I wanted to go back to working in a way that was more personal, which, for me, was artwork. Commercials and films are more collaborative.
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.
It's hard enough to make a film without everyone saying, "Hang on, is this version as good as the one Kubrick would have made?" In peoples' minds they'll always think if Kubrick had done it it would be so much better. You don't need that extra stress.
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.
Being able to make work - if it's on your terms, and it's a good fit with the people who are supporting it - can be a very interesting exercise. When it doesn't work is when an artist just connects with a brand, and they try to take advantage of each other.
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 theres a feeling that life is interconnected, that theres life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me, a lot of my work has dealt with what it means to be at the center of the universe and how alienating and kind of seductive it is. A lot of my work is very aggressive and very visual, but at the same time, it has a lot of tension in it and makes you kind of uncomfortable sometimes.
I never intended to become a commercial filmmaker in the first place. What I do requires time and experimentation. Commercial work is often not the best way to get the most innovative work, because it's about money and marketing. Although advertising is now embracing non-commercial people.
I think that in a weird way, as technology gets more sophisticated, people have become less aware of it. It's become part of our day to day life. We're seeing large-scale projection mapping, like on buildings. There's video everywhere. It's much less noticeable that we're actually looking at technology.
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.
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.
Fifty years from now I don't think optical realism is going to be an issue in visual communication any more. Experience is so much richer than light falling on your retina. You embody a microcosm of reality when you walk down the street - your memories, your varying degrees of awareness of what's going on around you, everything we could call the contextualizing information. Representing that information is going to be the main issue in the years ahead - how the world meets the mind, not the eye.
For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.