“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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
Figuring Grounds – like Tale Enclosure, 1985 – was edited from three hours of recordings made at the Stained Glass Studio in Barrytown, New York, where Hill’s Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come On Petunia), 1984, was also taped. Facing one another, Quasha and Stein begin vocalizing from the...
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...
Recorded in Woodstock, New York, Rock City Road incorporates multiple levels of rescanned images of walking on different surfaces, including pavement and snow-covered terrain. The images have been rescanned and manipulated using reel-to-reel videotape recorders. Editing actions—fast forward,...
This piece was originally planned by the artist as a reading for the Viewpoint series at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “It was an attempt to circumscribe my work in the structure of a reading,” Hill explains. Processual Video is minimal with regards to an “image” but quite complex in...
Objects from the artist’s studio (hammer, cathode ray tube, circuit board rack, chair, clip light) constitute the subjects for a series of short sequences in which a single object moves through a series of overlapping transformations. These are electronically altered in such a way that their...
Observaciones Sobre los Colores consists of a single video projection in which a boy reads a Spanish translation of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Color, Part 1 (1951), consisting of 88 segments, in real time over a period of 78 minutes. Hill provided a modified version of the book with all proper...
“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 beginning of a remake of an earlier work [Soundings, 1979] in which I wanted to extend the reflexivity of each text in relation to the interaction between different physical substances—in this case, sand—and the speaker cone. A loudspeaker fills the screen and I begin to speak, referring...
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...
Disturbance (among the jars) is a multi-lingual adaptation of selected Gnostic texts from the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945/46. The structure of the piece is based around the metaphor of fragmentation, more specifically, that of a broken sentence reflecting the original condition of many...
One of the earlier works Hill produced on the Rutt/Etra video synthesizer, Elements combines abstract “landscapes” with fragmented syllabic language. Undulating topological forms superimpose themselves on one another, changing their shape and direction of movement.
1980-81, 13:27 min, b&w, sound Videograms is an ongoing series of text/image constructs or syntaxes using the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, a device that enables Hill to sculpt electronic forms on the screen. Each "videogram" relates literally or conceptually to Hill's accompanying spoken text, which...
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...
