Gary Hill

b 1951 Santa Monica, CA (USA); 1973 first video experiments; in the 1980s starts a video program at the Cornish College of the Arts; since 1985 lives in Seattle (USA).

Gary Hill is one of the most important contemporary artists investigating the relationships between words, sounds and electronic images. The video image with its essential component sound is explored using different approaches of discourse analysis and models of language as a semantic and semiotic system. The exact conceptual frame of his works leads to precise formal image and sound structures as well as to a complex circuit of mutual re-definitions: immaterial, futile systems of displacement, fusion, detachments of constituents of meaning. His inquiries into linguistics and consciousness offer resonant philosophical and poetic insights, as he explores the formal conjunctions of electronic visual and audio elements with the body and the self.