Bill Viola

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.

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.

The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image.

Dawn and sunset are the times when Nature herself is unstable and in flux. The nocturnal world and the daytime world are meeting, and for a brief time coexisting. It's not a neat hard cut, but a blurred, irregular dissolve. These moments are the seams in existence through which we can get a glimpse of the deeper, fundamentally random, chance workings of a system in which we are only a small, insignificant player.

I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.