Twenty-six videos, covering a period stretching from the 70s to the 90s, make up the single channel programme dedicated to the American artist Gary Hill. The selection include works such as Elements of 1978, the first experience of the author with his own speech: in it, nearly unrecognisable fragments where Hill names the four seasons are heard. Such moment is particularly significant, since in his works speech is a way of provoking the experience of time.

The voices generate the images, thus giving an idea of time. Text and voice – the body is in this way used as an acoustic instrument – make further appearances in works such as Videograms of 1980-81, where electronic forms are sculpted on screen. Abstract, the videograms keep a literal or conceptual relationship with the text that is being read by the artist. "The vocabulary and the precision of this instrument (the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor) allowed the expansion of the notion of ‘electronic linguistics’ by means of textual narrative blocks created specially for the electronic vocabulary inherent to the Rutt/Etra", writes Hill.

A poet of the image, creator of bridges between video, philosophy and language, Hill is represented also by works of impact such as Site Recite, described by the author as a kind of "death cosmology": bones, texts, skulls, shells, butterfly wings, all laid out on a table to the eye of the camera. Created as a precursor of a videodisc, it brings together a "pile of small deaths", thus speaking about recurrent subjects in his career: memory, conscience, life and death.

artists

Works

Essay Lynne Cooke, 1994

Postscript: Re-Embodiments in Alter-Space

"ANTHROPOLOGISTS OF POSSIBLE SELVES, WE ARE TECHNICIANS OF REALIZABLE FUTURES" - DONNA HARAWAY

"Images are the dominant currency of communication", Margot Lovejoy argues in her book on eletronic media and postmodem culture. This has resulted, she contends, in a crisis of knowledge that is in fact a crisis of vision: "We can only see the world by forming a picture through various pecialized mediations". (1) Lack of a vision adequate to the eletronic datasphere has led, in turn, Scott Bukatman concludes, "to a set of allusive attempts to reconstitute the space of the computer in human – biological of physical – terms; in other words, to permit terminal space to become phenomenal". (2) Among those contributing to these attempts the work of artists is seminal, he believes, quoting in support J. G. Ballard’s belief that the (science fiction) writer’s role is to parallel the ontological redefinitions of the electronic era: "I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decade. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind [...] For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality". (3)

While granting the reality of the objective world, Maurice Merleau-Ponty nonetheless stressed that it is in the interactivity that occurs between the perceptible physical object and the perceiving motile subject that consciousness is instantiated. Fhenomenology thus proposes that the status of being is not an absolute condition but one that changes relative to changes in the experience of the real. Irrespective of whether eletronic "presences" can be said to exist in real spaces, experience of those spaces remains a "real" experience. Thus an examination of the cognitive processes of consciousness may be accorded priority over consideration of the veracity of any given external conditions. By focusing on the activity of a guided consciousness rather than on the absolute reality of the world "in itself", it may become possible to construct a phenomenology of those abstract and nonphysical spaces peculiar to eletronic technologies. From this, definitions of booth the modes of communication and the forms of social interaction they make possible may be constructed.

In "Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine)", by suppressing the "willing" normally integral to this familiar phrase when titling a recent installa- tion, Gary Hill suggests that conscious acquiescence will not be necessary: whether it is fictive or not, what is presented as real will be automatically, inevitably, even unavoidably, embraced as such. What was a goal for Ballard is for Hill, given his medium, virtually preordained. For, unlike current literature, reproductive technologies are among the principal conditiones of contemporary values and beliefs: their representations not only record objective reality but shape it to the point where they are frequently experienced as more potent than those provided by the everyday phenomenal world. As Vilém Flusser argues, "The imagination functioning in technical images is so powerful that we not only regard these images as reality, but also live within their functions". (4)

Images of two bodies, the dominant one female, the other male, move across the screens of some thirty monitors which, stripped of their casings and attached edge to edge along a steel beam, create a potential linear continuum of electronic space. The camera has lingered lovingly on these nudes: it almost nuzzles the skin in probing their surfaces, delivering the body to the gaze with a heightened immediacy. Seldom, however, do the forms glide along the chain of monitors in a smooth, continuous flow: their passage is constantly interrupted, spliced, cut, reayed, and replayed by means of a switching mechanism. Futher complicating the spectator’s perception of the "lovers" is the speed at which the images travel. So rapid is their passage that it becomes impossible to focus clearly on even a single frame, to fix it and hence appropriate it. Attempts to fuse the pair as a couple are equally problematic, for the overlapping, splicing and intercutting of their individual anatomies pos- tulates a connection very different from the conventional one melding discrete entities into a singular whole.

The bodies never blend, join, or fuse. The skin remains an impermeable boundary even when the body is fractured, its parts overlaid and inter- secting. What seems to galvanize these rapidly sequencing images is, nonetheless, a desire for proximity, a wish to suppress separation. Vividly present yet frustratingly elusive, this seductive montage of swiftly shifting shapes at once conjures notions of togetherness and simultaneously redefines them. The accelerations, reversals, slow- downs, ellipses, and fragmentary arrests within the incessant flow con- jure a stream of desire – the quintessence of eroticism. While seduction plays only on the surface, and coupling remains only tenuously proxi- mate, this nevertheless does not signify the endlessly deferred merger that characterizes frustration. A dizzying, capricious, voluptuous, and ultimately delirious swirl, "Suspension..." offers a sensuous paradigm for an ecstatic transcendence of the physicality of direct sexuality.

The intimacy which results from the camera’s proximity to the bodies would seem to promise an eroticism if the kind conventionaly linked to notions of voyeurism. What could have bee private disclosures in the form of transgressive glimpses are, however, rendered spectacular by the overtly exhibitionistic presentation of the work. Far from surrepti- tiously revealing the clandestine, this installation has the grandeur and sweep of something deliberately devised to be seen. It offers a specta- cle, in the sense that Guy Debord and others defined it: a surrogate self-contained form of reality.

The elevation of the monitors to overhead height, together with the vast length of the beam, keeps the viewer back in the cavernous space of the otherwise empty room, prohibiting any physical proximity to that which is viewed. The images hover luminously in the half-light, the darkened context further enhancing their intangibility and ephemerality. Unlike previous iconic depictions of lovers suspended in a timeless optical etheria, seen, say, in paintings of Paolo and Francesca by G. F. Watts, among others, this electronically manifest duo inhabits no coher- ent temporal entity. Their time and space (the space of kinesis) pertain to a nonphysical realm, that of electronic technology; these are the phantasmic spaces enabled by, and constituted through, communicative technologies. "Time and metaphorical spaces for texts (and subjects) to unfold are the parameters I begin with..." Gary Hill wrote recently. "It’s a kind of telescopic time that makes the viewer aware of the process of seeing – of beholding the world through sight that exists in the folds of time." (5) Perception, and hence apprehension, remains rooted in bodily being, as Merleau-Ponty argued, yet that which is perceived belongs now to another reality. Vision is at once imbricated in the world and disembodied, embedded yet suspended, precluded from grasping what it srveys.

In its exclusive focus on the naked body viewed in close proximity "Suspension of Disbelief (for Marine)" (1991-92) bears comparison with "Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place" which Hill made some two years earlier. Comprised of sixteen monitors varying in size from one-half inch to twenty-one inches, installed like a reliquary in a niche in the wall, this work transmits images of different parts of the human body life-size on each of its screens. By stretching the skin across the screens like a taut membrane, and by ensuring that the limbs disclose only abstract dark spaces in their interstices, Hill makes the forms vividly present to the viewer. Juxtaposed with these details of torso, organs, and limbs is an image of a finger laid on a page of text. A barely audible soundtrack draws the spectator forward in order to hear better the mumur of a voice almost obliterated by the rustle of turning pages and other ambient sounds. (6) This incessant but nearly inaudible speech finds its visual counterpart in the almost imperceptible motion of the anatomy. Such slight movement can be read as evidence simulta- neously that the body is alive and that it is being observed. The act of visual interpretion can be understood as isomorphic to the reading of a text: just as reading creates the text, so seeing conjures meaning. In one of his most prophetic early works. Hill asked "who am I but a figure of speech?". (7) This was in fact a rhetorical question, for much of the artist’s work at that time was expressly focused on the generation of reality by language. (8) Subsequently, however, Hill affirmed on a num- ber of occasions that the products of this verbal encoding may not be revelation, enlightenment or clarification, but their very observe. As seen in "Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (come on Petunia)", "URA ARU (the backside exists)", "Incidence of Catastrophe" and, above all, "DISTURBANCE (among the jars)", language only too easily unravels, dissolves, implodes, or shatters into multiple contrary pronouncements. As speech disintegrates, infantile babbling, nonsense, and glossolalia ensue, freeing the body from the restrictions of the conceptual into the sensual embrace of anatomacally generated sound. Given that speech has been pulverized in "Inasmuch..." to what Hill calls "the debris of utterance", rather than incorporating the listener/viewer as it normally does, it serves now to emphasize a cleavage in communication: the body wrapped in its own "hum". (9)

Video has often been described as a medium of surface effects. The delimited scale of the monitor, together with the relatively poor resolu- tion of the image and the constant motion of light partic es all, as Jean Fisher argues, mitigate against viewers "entering" the image in ways akin to those by which they imaginatively inscribe themselves into filmic space. (10) Moreover, since deep focus translates poorly onto the screen, video operates optimally writh a quite shallow depth of field. Thus instead of the viewer entering the illusory space of the recorded world, the motion and fluorescence of the photons propel the image for- ward so that it "invades" the observer’s ambience. For most of its early avatars, Hill included, video was a medium that privileged time-based experience, with real time normally replacing the reality of actual space. Yet in his recent work Hill has steadily relinquished conventional usages and forms of time in order to explore more complex spatio-temporalities. In "Inasmuch..." he capitalizes on these poter tialities to great effect. Because the hand-held camera does not alter either its focus or its position, and because the recordings are continuoesly replayed, the flux of real time seems disconnected from the norms of daily temporality, collapsed into an eternal present. Each monitor is thus the site of the body which appears on the screens as immutably present and yet outside actual time. Its impregnable solitude reduces the viewer’s role to that of mute witness at what Hill describes, disquieteningly, as "the incessant, how- ever fragmentary, anatomical site". (11) Presence is brought to betray a haunting absence.

Hill’s most recent works reveal a growing preoccupation with place, space, and time, and in particular with the kinds of spaces inhabited by or made available through the new electronic technologies. "Inasmuch..." has the proximity of a still life, but the site is not available to the body as a fully embodied agent. In "Between Cinema and a Hard Place" (1991) and, subsequently, "Suspension..." and "Tall Ships" (1992), a more fully developed interplay linking actual and visualized spaces accurs as Hill capitalizes on the spatio-temporal malleability of the electronic signal. Like "Suspension...", "Tall Ships" has no verbal component, and so provides no possibility of overcoming estrangement via language. Projected directly onto the walls of the installation, the images have been freed into the materiality of real time and space. Walking the ninety-foot-long corridor like space of "Tall Ships", the spectator is confronted with life-size figures who approach (and reced) apparently to intercept the viewer’s passage. But proximity fails to ensure connectedness. These sixteen figures of varying ages and sexes are first viewed from a multiplicity of vanishing points.

Initially glimpsed small, as if seen at a distance, they rapidly draw near as if to effect what is the simplest of encounters, a one-to-one confrontation. As in many of Hill’s previous works, relationships with the other are found necessarily to involve, if indeed they are not strictly confined to, forms of representation. On one level, such relationships might be described as projections. Here, exceptionally to date in Hill’s oeuvre, the interface between the image and the actual becomes the site of potential interaction. (12)

In "Inasmuch...", the relation between self and other is defined by the impregnable frontiers of the physical and illusory, which in this work lie at the interface between body and screen, skin and electronic surface. "Tall Ships" posits other relations by divesting the trameless continuum that is the hallmark of the video signal of its conventional physical constraint, the monitor. Whereas this might normally imperit the proximity of the image as it became absorbed into a continuous linear matrix, the fact that in this installation the projections are the sole source of light imbues them with an unexpected effect of embodiment in real space. Nonetheless, interaction cannot transgress the essential separateness of each protagonist: proximity does not vouchsafe connectedness. By contrast, "Between Cinema and a Hard Place" focuses directly on themes of division – more specifically, on frontiers in space – by setting up rapid and unpredictable movements from one kind of space to another at the same time as moving images from monitor to monitor. "Heidegger’s use of nature as a metaphorical place of thought is intervened upon, with images of landscapes and pastoral scenes being interrupted by variable fencing, posted signs and other interventions of spatial temporal limits" Hill recently wrote of this work. (13) In this way various – and sometimes contradictory – levels of time are conjured.

The text and pretext for this critique of "neighboring neamess" is a passage from Heidegger’s "The Nature of Language", which Hill adapted for his soundtrack. The installation comprises twenty-three monitors of varying sizes laid out irregularly on the ground. In physically occupying an indeterminate space, the piece provides an apt metaphor for an extract which the artist describes as "question (ing)a strictly parametrical view of space and time, posing the possibility of a "neighboring nearness" that does not depend on a spatial-temporal relationship". (14) "Tall Ships" operates in real time and space, but with the aid of a complex technology manifests the other as an ineluctably but teasingly unreachable image in projected spaces which are nonetheless extensions of the viewer’s own world. "Suspension..." and "Between 1 & 0", by contrast, postulate very different versions of subjects imbricated in electronic technologies, and hence of the relationships – the "proximity" – they permit. For common to both "Suspension..." and "Between 1 & 0" is a form of computer switching which renders their bodily subject(s) radically unlike anything Hill had devised before. Eschewing identifications based in bodily-kinetic knowledge, Hill presents a relationship betwwen the self and the other that is irremediably based in exteriority. In his early works this self is rendered locked in an essential solitude, to borrow a phrase from Maurice Blanchot who has been an important influence. Recently the impenetrable solitude which, for him as for Blanchot, lies at the heart of consciousness has begun to be re-examined as the body is inserted into the different kinds of non-Cartesian space facilitated by electronic technology. Precluded from inscribing him or her self into the novel spatio-temporal geographies which Hill devises (unlike many o thers working with virtual space who simulate actual space), the spectator is brought into an unfamiliar and uncertain proximity with the subject. Relaying images across banks of monitors in rapid but no necessarily linear succession, the switching mechanism creates a mode of temporality that has little to do with actual time, that is, with time lived (or recorded as in live relay). Likewise, the spaces opened in these works, if and when continuous, do not have the coordinates of Cartesian space. In this way Hill’s fragmentation and multiplication of bodly imagery in phantasmic spaces may be read as conforming to current motions of social identify in the technological era. In adopting such strategies of visualization, these works open to scrutiny the "spatio-temporal" zones of electronic sociality.

Vivian Sobchack’s perceptive article, "The Scene of the Screen: Towards a Phenomenology of Cinematic and Electronic Presence", provides an invaluable discussion of the ontology of this kind of visual space. (15) In exploring the phenomenological distinctions that separate photo- graphic, cinematic, and electronic "presences", she argues that only the space of the last is discrete, ahistoric, and dismbodied. A record of human vision and presence, the photogrph depicts a frozen moment from the past. In its immutability it, as Merleau-Ponty notes, "keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the 'metamorphosis'... of time". (16) Cinema enacts a present-time experience of physical, bodily spatial reality. Very different again is digital electronic technology which "atomizes and abstractly schematizes the analogic quality of the photogrphic and cinematic into discrete pixels and bits of information that are transmitted serially, each bit discontinuous, discontiguous, and absolute – each bit 'being-in-itself' even as it is part of a system". (17) In "Suspension..." the scale of the electronic band is that of a cinema screen. Through the close alignment of the frames an almost filmic sense of connectedness in space/time is hypothetically established. Moreover, on at least one occasion in the cycle, a single shot moves continuously from monitor to monitor, creating a spatial analogue for the cinematic flow of frame after frame. Yet, ultimately, these allusions serve only to make more apparent the distinctiveness of the spatio- temporal matrices of electronic technology.

In "Between 1 & 0", thirteen monitors are grouped on a wall in a configuration that resembles a plus sign. The viewer is confronted with a subject which is locked in what seems to be an unfinishable process of writing itself – literally and figuratively writing itself. Literally in the sense of employing codes integral to that system, and metaphorically in several ways. Although not easily identified precisely, the soundtrack (made by graphite scratching a sheet of paper) is obviously of some- thing scraping itself along a surface, etching itself into existence. And the backwards and forwards movement of the frames on the sign may be likened to the process of beginning a sketch: the pen hovers, wavering, over the ground, searching for the proper point at which to begin the process of definition.

"(E)lectronic space", Sobchack writes, "constructs objective and superficial equivalents to depth, texture and invested bodily movement [...] (C)onstant action and 'busyness' replace the gravity which grounds and orients the movement of the lived-body with a purely spectacular, kinetically exciting, and often dizzying, sense of bodily freedom (and freedom from the body)." (18) Devoid of center and ground, these phantasmic spaces have at best only a vector graphic simulation of perspective to guide a human eye that has become distinct from is corporeality, its temporality, and its subjectivty. In "Between 1 & 0", as in "Suspension...", Hill constructs a disembodied space in place of a Cartesian one: "machinic" images spin across a field voided of spatio- temporal metrics in a vertiginous display of their very depthlessness.

No rapport connecting viewer and projection of the kind initially proposed in "Tall Ships" is possible in "Between 1 & 0". But neither is there that divorce of the spectator inherent in the spectacle found in "Suspension...". In fact, this is not an installation, properly speaking: the work is best seen as a transmission tout court. Phenomenologically, the electronic is experienced as a discrete and simultaneous transmission, Sobchack argues, for "The materiality of the electronic digitalizes durée and situation so that narrative, history, and a centered (and central) investment in the lived body become atomized and dispersed across a system that constitutes temporality not as a flow of conscious experience, but as the transmission of random information". The primary value os electronic temporality is thus the instant, she concludes: "Temporality becomes paradoxically constituted as a homogeneous experience of

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manifested through technological prosthetics, agency in these spaces becomes proximate. This, in turn, entails, Stone contends, "that as these prosthetics become more complex, the relationship between agency and authorizing body becomes more discursive". (30)

For optimistic theorists like Haraway and Stone, "virtual systems and the social worlds they imply are examples of the flexible and lively adaptations that persons seeking community are beginning to explore". (31) They discern a potential range of innovative solutions to prevailing constraints in social interaction, whereas Hill’s vision of these communicative capacities seems at present more ambivalent. His version of their erotic capability, adumbrated in "Suspension..." may be lyrical, just as his refiguring of the subject in "Between 1 & 0" apparently offers the cyborg a liberating "schizo" mode (in the sense outlined by Deleuze and Guattari), yet his embrance of the simulated remains qualified. Al the heart of his doubt lies an ongoing struggle with the question of what the differences in our relationships with the simulated and the actual amount to. His refusal of any prescriptive answer suggests that these recent works are likely to prove but prologues to further reworkings of the structure of sociality and more detailed mappings of the geography of elsewheres.

REPRINTED FROM GARY HILL, HENRY ART GALLERY, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, SEATTLE, 1994, PP. 81-9.

Notes

(1) Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989); quoted in Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 109. I am indebeted to Bukatman’s theses in more ways than this and the follow- ing citations indicate.

(2) Ibid.

(3) This statement, made in 1974 in a new preface to Ballard’s 1973 novel, Crash, is quoted in Bukatman, op. cit., pp. 116-7.

(4) Vilém Flusser, "The Status of Images", in Metropolis (Berlin: Martin Gropius Bau/ New York; Rizzoli, 1991), p. 53.

(5) Gary Hill, "Interviewed", Gary Hill (Valencia: IVAM Centre del Carme, 1993), p. 152.

(6) The impression it gives of hovering on the borders of intelligibility recalls Maurice Blanchot’s evocative characterization: "Not speech, barely a murmur, barely a tremor, less than silence, less than the abyss of the void; the fullness of the void, something one cannot silence, occupying all of space, the uninterrupted, the incessant, a tremor and already a murmur, not a murmur but speech, and not just any speech, distinct speech, precise speech, within my reach". Celui qui ne m’ac- compagnait pas (Paris; Gallimard, 1953), quotad in Foucault – Blanchot, Michel Foucault, "Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside" (New York; Zone, 1990), pp. 22-3.

(7) "Primarily Speaking" (1981-83). In this tape, images were linked to speech in such a way that as each syllable was enunciated the picture changed. Impetus to explore this and related aspects of the technology grew out of a concern, emerging in the ‘70s, with investigating the specifics of the medium, a concern shared at that time by many pio-

neers working in this rapidly changing field of electronics. In Hill’s video work from the late ‘70s, sound was a key element; in the early ‘80s it took on the guise of language and text, as well as speech.

(8) Heidegger’s notion, "Language is the house of heing in which man dwells", has been central to much of Hill’s though be arrived at it via Blanchot, Ludwig Wittgenstein and other writers rather than directly through the texts of the German philosopher. For a fuller discussion see Lynne Cooke, "Gary Hill; Beyond Babel", Gary Hill (Valencia: IVAM Centre del Carme, 1993), pp. 163-71. That this notion has continued to be important to Hill’s thinking is evident from two pieces he has made recently: the four-minute tape "Site Recite (a prologue)" (1989) and "I Believe It Is an Image in Light of the Other" (1991-92). In "Site Recite...", language not only generates and shapes all, it threatens to consume all. For most of this tape the camera moves in a circular track- ing shot that evokes an omniscient vision, or a model of a mind gener- ating a world. During its final few seconds, however, an image of a mouth speaking, recrded from a point near the back of the tongue, is suddenly substituted for the displaced, and hence placeless, still life which had up to that moment been the sole subject under review. Its highly charged concluding staterment – "imagining the brain closer than the eyes" – gives weight to Raymond Bellour’s claim that "there is no visual image that is not more and more tightly gripped, even in its essential, radical withdrawal, inside an audiovisual or scriptovisual... image that envelops it" (Raymond Bellour, "The Double Helix", Passages de I’Image [Barcelona: Centre Cultural de la Fundación Caixa de Pensions, 1991], p. 72). In "I Believe..." seven canisters containing monitors and lenses are suspended over open books strewn on the floor in a darkened space. Images of the body and of writing are literal- ly over laid so that text becomes embodied and anatomy encoded in the printed script.

(9) Gary Hill, "Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place", in OTHERWORDSANDIMAGES (Copenhagen: Video Gallerie/NY Carlberg Glyptotek, 1990), p. 27.

(10) Jean Fisher, "V-I-D-E-O-Z-O-N-E", in Topographie II: Untergrund (Vienna: 1991), pp. 26-50.

(11) Gary Hill, OTHERWORDSANDIMAGES, op. cit., p. 27.

(12) By contrast, "Site Recite", subtitled "(a prologue)", was originally meant to be an interactive video, that is, to provide a context in which viewers could enter and move around according to their own impulses. Through a kind of phenomenological insistence, it would have been able. Hill hoped, to "make participants aware of their own mediation process". Quoted in Christine van Assche. "Interview with Gary Hill," Galeries Magazine, December 1990/ January 1991, p. 141.

(13) Gary Hill, "Between Cinema and a Hard Place", unpublished text, 1991, unpaginated.

(14) Ibid.

(15) Vivian Sobchack, "The Scene of the Screen: Towards a Phenomenology of Cinematic and Electronic Presence", Post-Script, 10, 1990, pp. 50-9.

(16) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind", in The Primacy of Perception, James M. Edie (ed.) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 186.

(17) Sobchack, op. cit., p. 56.

(18) Sobchack, op. cit., pp. 57-8.

(19) Sobchack, op. cit., p. 57.

(20) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987), p. 25.

(21) Ibid.

(22) Ibid., p. 153.

(23) Ibid.

(24) Ibid., pp. 164-5.

(25) Ibid., p. 162.

(26) In her now celebrated text, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century". Haraway starts from the premise that the cyborg (a term she analyzes at length) literalizes the inseparability of the human and machine in a sym- biosis of body and technology from which she formulates a potential utopian future for this mythic state of being, one which will elude those racial, gendered, and class-based dichotomies that have lain at the very heart of western culture. Donna J. Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1991), pp. 149-82. (27) Allucquère Roseanne Stone, "Virtual Systems," in Incorporations, Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds.) (New York: Zone, 1992), p. 609. (28) Ibid.

(29) Ibid., p. 610. (30) Ibid., p. 616. (31) Ibid, p. 620.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "13º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil": de 19 a 23 de setembro de 2001, p. 118 a 120, São Paulo, SP, 2001.

Interview Helio Hara, 2001

Gary Hill _interview

In the last few years, technology became ubiquitous. do you have the feeling that the more it progresses, the more freedom there will be for some artists?

Being human means being technological but one must appropriate technology rather than be appropriated by it. The image is what has become ubiquitous, indeed, with the help of technology. And the image is what should put us on guard. The continual stream of changing images produces an unconscious fascination and this is what is dangerous when it goes unmediated. The speed at which technology changes and the "possibilities" that it offers are exponentially increasing with time.

What were once gadgets are now everyday "must have" devices; what were once special effects are ordinary parts of the image language. When technology stops working we see what technology is. In a similar way when we become very ill or have a brush with death we feel the presence and vulnerability of life. I have surrounded myself with machines for making art and sometimes I think it’s only so I can refute them.

Do you actually think of technological interactivity as something very different from the interaction of the aesthetic experience?

"Interactive" is another overused term much like "installation".

The best description I’ve heard to differentiate these two notions of interactivity is by the terms "implicit" and "explicit". Implicit meaning interacting with the world at large (aesthetic experience or not) and explicit meaning there is some kind of technological interface with which a participant engages a work through/with. It wouldn’t be difficult to add many subsets to these. This latter definition puts one in the loop with machines. It involves feedback and cybernetics. I think for an explicit interactive work to be successful, the interface and its complexity cannot feel self-conscious but instead are rather "natural" – one engages an explicit interactive work as easy as one drives a car. Many early explicit interactive works had the problem of forcing the participant into a self-conscious position every time a decision had to be made. For example: "you are here; where do you want to go; A, B, C, or D?". This was particularly true of CD-ROMs and other interactive "branching" media. Intuitive processes are halted by bringing you back to the surface — the technological script so to speak. Current interfaces are considerably more sophisticated and intuitive, nevertheless, one remains aware of the interface. There’s something about it that’s almost fetishistic and this is why in work that is powerful the question of interactivity is mute.

You started working with sculpture. At what point did you realize video was a good medium to deal with the physicality of language?

My initial experience with video was very powerful. It seemed to have something to do with my nervous system having to do with feedback and watching myself see myself and "interacting" with this conversation. I was sitting inside a process and at the same time I could view the process from the outside. Maybe it was something comparable to one’s first acid trip, or a certain kind of breakthrough in psychoanalysis or "the moment" in an extreme sport of some kind. Unfortunately, at least In retrospect, I became fascinated, or should I say, mesmerized by the electronic image — its architecture, how one could process it and manipulate it and so on. I was a pixel slave. It wasn’t until the mid-seventies that I began to speak and use my body to interrupt the steady flow of images — the signal. At that point things got a lot more interesting for me.

In the 80’s, many artists were using video in a rather static way. Now we see video being used in the film industry, on the internet.. Do you actually think all media are becoming more and more intermingled?

Once it’s digital, there go the flood gates! The web is here to stay and "intermedia", a term coined by the poet Dick Higgins decades ago,

is so natural to the web that it will foster many more possibilities than it already has. Net art is going through a similar process that video did in its early stages. They are very related because of this notion of intermedia – not to mention the political implications that play into access and who controls and owns the media. The aesthetic possibilities of the net are not as interesting as the more conceptual based projects. It’s important to realize that video, net art, etc. are linked to many sources in the past—its not just new technology and therefore new forms of art.

To what extent is meaning important in works like "Remarks on Color", that will be presented in São Paulo, and which consists on reading?

"Remarks on Color" is very much about meaning; how we agree on meaning even when, ultimately, we are not really sure what another person is precisely saying. We go on in dialogue, speaking and listening because we seek meaning — we want meaning in our lives and in the things around us. In "Remarks on Color" I’ve tried to externalize this process by having a child reading something that she understands very little of which changes the pronunciation and inflection. Its something like when one sees an optical illusion or when a word has a double meaning there is an instance when one crosses over and sees the other image or word/meaning. In this kind of space meaning doesn’t feel fixed but something that is closer to an ongoing process wherein the nature of meaning makes itself known. Philosophy has an important place in your work. In "Remarks on Color", for example, there is a reference to Wittgenstein...

I’ve made a number of works that were inspired by specific texts rather than full readings of particular thinkers. In all cases I would say it had to do with treating these texts almost as physical objects in which understanding and comprehension are brought to the fore and experienced as process. My relation to these texts and how I worked with them comes partly from Gregory Bateson’s metalogues and his description of their structure. He talks about the content of the conversation being reflected in the structure of the conversation itself – something like form and content but from a slightly different angle. In fact, one of the first works I did after a writer’s text was Bateson’s "Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?". I made a kind of metavideo on the metalogue of the same title with the addition of the subtitle (Come On Petunia).

What are the changes in works like "Remarks on Color" when it is presented in English, German or Portuguese, languages with different structures?

Well I’m hoping that the gist of it is pretty much the same as far as the actual readings go. Sure there are changes in nuance, inflection, (mis)pronunciations and word transformations, but the way meaning kind of comes and goes and the listener reflexively experiences comprehension must be very similar. On the other hand the sets or staging of the readings are somewhat different, particularly the Portuguese version, which takes place outside in green foliage. Also, the colors that the readers wear are different which brings about different relationships to the text depending on what colors are being referred to.

Are there special areas/issues you’d particularly like to address in the future?

I’m still interested in an ontological space wherein being, thinking and perceiving are active in a somewhat self-conscious way and at the same time experienced on a very visceral level – where thinking becomes almost palatable. On the other hand I remain fascinated with the everyday problem of how one image follows the next.

How do you see the intersection between sound and image in your work?

When I began using video I was doing a lot of sound work with sculpture. I worked with steel welding rods which by chance had rich sonic possibilities. This led me to tape-recorders, tape loops, feedback and ultimately electronically generated sound. I became very interested in the notion of seeing what one hears and vice versa — something like a mobious band where neither takes precedence over the other.

I extended this idea with speech. In "Around & About" and "Primarily Speaking" the images are edited to the syllabic elements of the language giving the effect of language having space and time as opposed to being an object of meaning.

Time is a crucial issue in the video environment. How have time, memory and language been articulated in your work?

This is an extremely broad question that covers a lot of ground. I will try to get at the spirit of it by talking about a specific work, "Midnight Crossing", 1997. To begin with, the title itself comes from a moment that occurs in time code. When 23:59:59:29 changes to 00:00:00:00 it can be referred to as "midnight crossing" which really refers a kind of no time — or perhaps a brief moment to think about time. In the work there is a spoken text constructed by individual phrases that are heard at varying distances apart, say 15 seconds to 90 seconds with silences between. During the time of vocalization a number of high-intensity lights come on instantly lighting up a screen and its scaffolding-like structure obliterating whatever image that was there. As the viewer waits for the next image that fades up from absolute blackness they are dealing with afterimages of the screen and scaffolding which are "moving" around and "mixing" with a new image slowly making itself visible and re-anchoring the screen and support device. The time of light intervenes on the construction of narrative through the images at the same time sounding the next link or phrase that the viewer continues constructing and remembering the spoken text. More and more the question arises: was that a memory of an image and/or language from this space and time or that of the viewer’s collective memory?

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, " 13º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica Videobrasil":19 a 23 Setembro, p.105 and 106, São Paulo, SP, 2001.