Gary Hill

Gary Hill
Gary Hill, The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment, 2011
Born	(1951-04-04) April 4, 1951 (age 65) Santa Monica, California, USA
Nationality	American
Known for	Art Performance Sculpture Electronic Art New Media Art
Notable work	Electronic Linguistic (1977), Happenstance (part one of many parts) (1982-83), Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia) (1984), Incidence of Catastrophe (1987-88), Tall Ships (1992), HanD HearD (1995-96), Frustrum (2006)
Awards	MacArthur, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Leone d’Oro

Gary Hill (born 1951) is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Often viewed as one of the foundational artists in video art, based on the single-channel work and video- and sound-based installations of the 1970s and 1980s, he in fact began working in metal sculpture in the late 1960s. Today he is best known for internationally exhibited installations and performance art, concerned as much with innovative language as with technology, and for continuing work in a broad range of media. His longtime work with intermedia explores an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity. The recipient of many awards, his influential work has been exhibited in most major contemporary art museums worldwide.

Gary Hill's work has often been discussed in relation to his incorporation of language/text in video and installation, most evident in a work like Incidence of Catastrophe (1987–88). In the late 1960s, he began making metal sculpture and, in , engaged by wire sculpture’s sounds, explored extensions into electronic sound, video cameras and tape, playback/feedback, video synthesizers, sound synthesizers, installation-like constructions, video installations, interactive art and public interventions. Later in the 1970s, living in Barrytown, New York, interacting with poets/artists George Quasha and Charles Stein, he extended his growing interest in language to a level of poetics and complex text, as well as performance art and collaboration. Initially “language” for him was not specifically words but the experience of a speaking that emerged inside electronic space (certain sounds “seemed close to human voices”), which he called “electronic linguistics” (first in the transitional non-verbal piece, Electronic Linguistic [1977]). From that point, irrespective of whether a given piece uses text, his work in particular instances inquires into the nature of language as intrinsic to electronic/digital technology as art medium. Verbal language soon enters this electronic focus co-performatively, as an intensification of a dialogue with and within the medium, yet with a new language force all its own, its own unprecedented poetics. Highly realized single-channel works in this process include: Processual Video (1980), Videograms (1980–81), and Happenstance (part one of many parts) (1982–83), another stage of the dialogue with technology as a language site where machines talk back. Here the artist’s path moves to the celebrated language-intensive works of the 1980s: Primarily Speaking (1981–83), Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia) (1984), URA ARU (the backside exists) (1985–86), and Incidence of Catastrophe (1987–88).