Movies: Gary Hill

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 do...

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 concep...

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 ...

The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment is a declaration claiming the psychoactive event of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) as a "found performance" and as "the art experience par excellence." The claim is expanded upon, suggesting that over time it will...

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 m...

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,...

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 meani...

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 ...

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 an...

...

DVD insert of monograph Gary Hill: Around & About: A Performative View containing a compilation of Hill's performance art....

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 p...

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....

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 p...

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 sen...

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 directi...

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 latte...

“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 t...

Using the phenomenon of inverted (or negative) video feedback, this work constructs a one-to-one correspondence between recited text and image. Black and white rectangles, embedded one within another against a black background, are generated through ...

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 elect...