Quotes by Alva Noto

• 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.
• 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.
• You cannot always make such big exhibitions, because they consume too much time and energy.
• 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.
• There is always room for coincidence.
• 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.
• 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.
• Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence.
• 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.
• 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?
• I try to keep a balance between conceptional or intellectual comprehension and emotional understanding.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.