Alva Noto Quotes

#1. I always try hard to arrange all media in a way so that it expresses what I want - this is not limited to one medium alone and varies from case to case.

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#2. Some things can be perfectly expressed by sound alone and images would only be disturbing. Other times, sound would be possible, but visuals are much stronger and closer to what I want to express and then again, they sometimes overlap perfectly.

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#3. There is always room for coincidence.

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#4. One often thinks that using 2 different things like visual and sound lead to 2 different conclusions - to a different content - but in in my case it is all one.

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#5. It is important for me that a certain depth and variety of both exist next to each other. I am very careful not to sacrifice the one for the other.

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#6. It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.

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#7. I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds.

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#8. The subject of my work has a lot to do with general, artistic matters, questions like: What is creativity? Where do we come from? What are our motors? What is coincidence? What is logic?

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#9. When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

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#10. Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence.

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#11. I try to keep a balance between conceptional or intellectual comprehension and emotional understanding.

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#12. Starting off, all options are always open, but as soon as you choose something, you inevitably limit yourself. If you go for B, A is out.

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#13. I made a lot of different experiments with tapes at that time, until I finally realized around 1995, that sound is an interesting subject for me. Ever since then sound got more and more integrated into my art works, musically as well as physically.

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#14. You cannot always make such big exhibitions, because they consume too much time and energy.

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