This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.
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.
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.
A doctor once told me that with crying you aren't sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don't cry: you scream, you try to run. When it's over and you're OK, that's when you cry.
Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.
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.
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.
Video artists being at the low end of the totem pole economically, one of the ways we survive is to go around showing work and giving these talks.
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.
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 spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
You can always tell in a movie when they are setting you up for something. If someone leaves an important object on the table and walks away, the camera will have some way of indicating that to you.
