The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.

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.

The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.

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.

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.

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

Human beings have always been creative. The guys who were making the pyramids, and archaeological research has showed us this, had little figurines made by the workers, to express their devotion to their god.