The film tells a story with no dialogue. The group of boy skaters are suddenly at a point when one of the boys sees a young girl, and becomes interested in her. This causes a rift with the other boys, who challenges him to a skating duel that goes down a hilly street. The young boy loses. However,...
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...
Dave Jones prototype modules (keyers, color field generators, output amplifier), black-and-white camera, microphone and Serge audio modules (voltage controlled oscillators, filters, sequencer)
Two color video cameras, two microphones, Dave Jones prototype modules (input amplifiers, variable soft/hard keyers, output amplifier, analog-to-digital converter, bit switch, digital-to-analog converter), assorted speaker cones, enclosed speaker, sand, large spike nails, lighter fluid, lighter,...
Recorded on location in Japan, this work was inspired by the notion of “acoustic palindromes,” aural versions of written palindromes, located in the Japanese language. Hill creates this palindromic world as a site for excavation, uncovering new meanings and images by focusing on reversals and...
This tape is the first of Hill’s works for which he deliberately wrote a screenplay. The title defines the piece’s starting point: Alice in Wonderland asks her omniscient father why things get in a muddle. They then talk on a metalinguistic level. A glimpse through the looking glass reveals an...
Our visual field is dominated by gossamer layers that become distorted in fluid motion, break off, begin anew and continually change color. As we continue looking, they break down into seemingly amorphous constructions. We see details, textures and patterns from curtains, whose form responds to air...
A single solid white line rotates 180 degrees, beginning at a vertical position in the middle of the screen. At first, it forms “stair-steps,” and then, approaching horizontality, it intermittently breaks up, literally between the (scan) lines. Continuing, the line reconstitutes itself as it...
Our visual field is dominated by gossamer layers that become distorted in fluid motion, break off, begin anew and continually change color. As we continue looking, they break down into seemingly amorphous constructions. We see details, textures and patterns from curtains, whose form responds to air...
“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...
“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.”
In this program video artist Gary Hill uses a number of his pieces to investigate otherness and ambiguity, dislocation of the senses, the boundary between words and comprehension, the physicality of text, and figurative interactivity.
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...
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...
This rarely screened film was used to raise funds for the making of Energy and How to Get It. High-energy physicist Robert Golka was granted a lease on an airplane hangar once used to build B-29 bombers to further his experiments on ball lightning and free energy distribution. By the time Robert...
In Bathing, as in his Mirror Road, Windows and Objects with Destinations, Hill uses the camera and image processing devices to explore the malleability of electronic colors and image density.
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...
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.
The associative stream of images and sounds treats the word as an abstract structure. Spoken and written text flows from image to image, morphing into the shape of a circle, triangle or square. The robotic voice mechanically decomposes the geometric word formation, depriving it of its original...
