“Hagen: Is it important to you to understand the process by which the image appears?

Woody: In this need to understand these tools, to being with, I could replace an aesthetic appreciation of the images they produce with an appreciation of the process of understanding their structure. In fact, the process of understanding these structures became aesthetic to me. But I also suspect that I feel again some kind of need to express literature. I’ve found these codes to be in fact alphabetical, and, as I put it imprecisely, kind of “syntactic” – which is the word I’m trying to define in this particular work …”

“… The tools and systems have taught me more of course, than I’ve taught them, since I’m struggling with the basic operation of them. I treat them as colleagues, rather than attempting to control them totally. As soon as I can control something, I reach for the next stage which is out of control. In my personal evolution I’ve always instinctively tried to find things that were hard to control. They may be primitive in their output and, in fact, they may not be satisfactory to an observer who expects aesthetic satisfaction.”