Gary Hill, a pioneer of the second generation of video artists, began creating his first videos in 1973 during an artist residency at Woodstock Community Video. In 1979, after meeting poets George Quasha and Charles Stein, Hill began to delve into on experimental work exploring the relationship between video imagery and language.

In 1980, Gary Hill created Black/White/Text with the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, a device developed in 1973 by engineer Steve Rutt and video artist Bill Etra. Employing reversed video feedback and basic elements—a rectangular shape and a sung text broken down into syllables—Hill constructed the video as a dialogue between image and sound. The piece begins with a white rectangle on a black background, accompanied by the artist’s voice chanting the syllables ‘rec/tan/gle’. The video, created by the closed-circuit system, gradually becomes more complex, with black-and-white rectangles nesting within one another as the soundtrack narrates the on-screen evolutions. As the video progresses and the number of rectangles increases, the sound channels multiply, forming a kind of musical canon. Hill’s textual score illustrates and enacts the principle of feedback through its division into seven syllable groups, following a mathematical progression: 3, 6, 12, 24, 36, 48, and up to 96 syllables [1]. The growing number of rectangles, combined with the expanding musical phrases, creates a sense of visual and auditory saturation. As the rectangles extend beyond the edges of the screen, they are transformed into a field of horizontal lines that become distorted, undulating in a hallucinatory chaos.

Marie Vicet, 2025
Translated by Laurie Hurwitz

[1] See George Quasha and Charles Stein, An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2009), p. 91. Hill’s text was later reused by the artist for the video installation Glass Onion (1981).