Gary Hill

The strategy for recording and composing Air Raid was derived from sound rather than image. This produced some unusual juxtapositions between images found in the everyday: a lawnmower, the wrapping of fruit with tin foil, a cement mixer, record player, television, and among others, the eerie image of an air raid siren. A negative double of the image horizontally slides away every so often as if ruptured by the violence of the sound. The last image shows a butterfly opening and closing its wings as if it were tuning the only silent segment of the work.

In Mirror Road, Hill uses the camera and image processing devices to explore the malleability of electronic colors and image density. Amorphous structures move across the monitor like drifting clouds, changing color and direction. From time to time structures of fantastic color landscapes move past one another in the lower and upper halves of the picture (the rearview mirror takes up the upper half of the frame), only to be recombined into an amorphous unity.

“The image plane is divided into three sections. In the lower half, a close-up of two hands form a circle out of a metal rod. The upper half of the screen is vertically divided into two parts. On the right, a concurrent view of bending the rod with the entire body is visible in high contrast black and white. On the left is the green trace of an oscilloscope. A sine wave tone is first heard corresponding with the static green trace, a horizontal line. I drone a ‘similar’ tone that together with the sine wave changes the trace into a wavering circle. The steadier the sound I make, the steadier the circle. As I expend more energy bending the rod to ‘copy’ the electronically generated circle, my voice struggles to maintain pitch. Consequently the circle vibrates, collapses and morphs into multiple forms, mirroring the strain of my voice."

A humanoid form strikes its body while making primal guttural sounds. At times the form is “stopped” and “started” using the pause of a reel-to-reel video player—a frozen line of noise (an asynchronous frame) cuts through the image reinforcing the sense of physicality. The sounding form is eventually set in an electronically generated landscape with temple-like forms of undulating feedback. Further processing of the voice and additional rhythmic electronic sounds are suggestive of ritual.

Goats and Sheep uses the source material of the installation Withershins, 1995, consisting of two simultaneous views of a person signing: the hands and arms are framed in one, and the back of the head and top of the shoulders in the other. This latter view catches the hands when they refer to the head during signing. For Goats and Sheep, Hill changed the color image into black-and-white, re-recorded his own voice and “re-synchronized” it to the original signing. The stereo field is used to double the voice with about a second of delay added to the sound. This doubling mirrors the hands and numerous references and repetitions heard in the text.

The work’s images appear as visualizations of electronically generated sounds. Initially, small pulsating pixel structures occasionally appear on the black screen. These monadic forms become larger, ultimately filling the picture plane and pulsating ever more intensely.

Returning to the primal source of language, Hill explores the physical and subconscious origins of speech. In a continuous shot of a rhythmic, linguistically inspired chant-performance by George Quasha and George Stein, the camera wanders from mouth to face to hands to figure in an open-ended visual search. The performers use the body as an acoustic instrument of sound and abstract utterances.

Dave Jones prototype modules (keyers, color field generators, output amplifier), black-and-white camera, microphone and Serge audio modules (voltage controlled oscillators, filters, sequencer)

“A structural work (with humor) that uses indeterminacy to forge an abstract landscape upon which the ‘vision’ of an ox appears. A sequence of words—hierarchically ordered from the utilitarian (functions and processes of the tools being used to make the piece) to the more abstract and conceptual, ‘content,’ ‘concept,’ and ‘vision’—become the building blocks of a linguistic picture story.”

“Made just before Around & About, this work is something of a ‘manifesto in jest’ against television…. I’m a sit-in viewer looking slightly up at the screen making simple gestures into the camera. The mood is ambiguous as I seem to be watching a mirror, covering my face, reaching out to the camera, obstructing my head with a harsh (interrogator’s) lamp, and maybe more. The image, distorted through a fisheye lens, gives the impression of a concave monitor, as if the whole act were seen through a peephole or pinhole camera. In some sense I ‘play’ both sides of the screen—performer and viewer attempting to ‘connect’ either way. As ‘commentary’ it’s two-way, making it also a commentary on commentary.”

The artist’s mouth fills the whole image plane. Silently the words “red,” “blue,” “green” are slowly and repeatedly articulated. The color of the screen switches from red to blue to green at a quickened rate. Utilizing the same rate, the spoken words, “red,” “blue,” and “green,” are cut together into syllabic combinations of the three words making up the asynchronous sound track. The individual words, barely intelligible as spoken, are more easily “read” on the uniformly moving lips. (Quasha, George and Charles Stein. An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009, p. 589)

No description available.

Blind Spot constructs a space of living portraiture by “focusing time” on an exchange between the artist (the camera) and a man on the street in the small Algerian neighborhood of Belsunce in Marseille, France. As the camera zooms in slowly on its subject, the imagery is interrupted by longer and longer segments of black/silence, in essence slowing the scene down so that it almost reaches the photographic.

In this work, the field of Hill’s experimentation is the synchronization of visual and linguistic elements. For Equal Time, he sets up a minimalist arrangement, whereby two identical panels with grid patterns, starting respectively on the left and right side of the monitor, slowly move across the screen against a black background to the opposite side. As the panels overlap they produce moiré patterns. Each is associated with the voice of a different speaker, whose voices emerge from the left or right stereo channel. As soon as the panels completely overlap, the words of the two texts merge and the two voices, now in unison, produce a phasing sound similar to the visual moiré pattern of the panels.

Silent or with minimal sound, Hill's early formalist works explore the manipulation of electronic color and image density through the camera obscura and image processing devices. Of these tapes, Hill has written that "much of the subject matter and the expressionistic method of working underline and in some sense parody the traditional medium of painting." In Windows, the image of windows in a darkened room is digitized, densely layered, and otherwise abstracted in a series of graphic compositions.

“I was thinking of the camera as a kind of archeological tool that I could use to dig into or slice through the landscape —one among many studies toward using the camera in a highly physical way.”

The basis of this “sound/image construct,” recorded in real time, are three black-and-white still images: a keyboard, a flute, and an African drum. These motifs are altered through digitalization, solarization, and interframe switching. As they alternate, the images are accompanied acoustically by simple tonal routines of the instruments shown – little sequences of sound on the keyboard, some drum beats, a brief trill of the flute. The solarization effect of the images changes with the sounds. The work intensifies as it progresses, and images and sounds succeed one another ever more rapidly until a melody of the three instruments emerges. The frequency of the video images continues to increase, with the result that the images pulsate ever more quickly until they gradually overlay one another, producing a cinematographic effect through interferences. Parallel to this, the audio frequency of the melody rises until fundamental tones form, lasting several seconds.

This work is the single-channel version of a multi-channel installation of the same name. The picture plane is divided into a left and a right half. A changing background is formed by colorful, highly graphic patterns reminiscent of TV test signals and various monochrome surfaces. Two smaller rectangles appear on the surface, in which video sequences are running. The two image strands show landscapes, interiors, objects, graphical images and text that are sometimes used in contrast, and on other occasions the same image can be seen mirrored in each rectangle. They are accompanied by Hill’s recitation of a long text, whose syllabic sequence determines the rhythm of the images (the screen changes with each uttered syllable). His voice comes alternately out of the left and right stereo channels functioning like a dialogue. This is broken into sections by a singing, but electronically altered, voice.

A fixed color camera is slightly defocused on the wire mesh of a window screen. Outside the window the leaves of trees are moving with the wind. The images, about one-half second each, are edited directly to the master tape at intervals based on the set-up time of each edit. The sound is of the room itself, which is, for the most part, the editing button being pushed down for each edit. With each edit the wire mesh and background colors shift slightly. The work is about ‘meshing’ time and view

“In 1979-80, I was teaching in the Media Studies Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, filling in for Woody and Steina Vasulka, who had left for Santa Fe. Midway in the year I abruptly had to leave my apartment and move into my office—a relatively small space with a desk, a couple of chalkboards, a couch, plus everything I owned, which was mostly media equipment. About all I could do was work, if only to keep from feeling claustrophobic (moving things around seemed to make the space bigger). Around & About came out of a ‘what if’ scenario. What if I were to cut images to every syllable of a spoken text? (A way to keep me busy?) A daunting task in the time of U-matic machines and sloppy controllers. I did it all manually, hitting the edit button for every syllable. With each rewind I would listen and anticipate the coming syllable, learning as I went along to adjust for delayed reaction."