At the "Video Viewpoint" conference in New York's Museum of Modern Art, Gary Hill presented his work method based on the relationship between the image and a text. The artist chose to present a lecture, where he read his discourse, synchronised with the sequence of images on a screen turned towards the audience. Processual Video brings these elements together.

This video is articulated around an account that gives perceptions of the landscape and the thoughts and memory of a man living near the sea. It also expresses mental processes. The image of the line is central to this work; it moves from the horizon of the landscape to the mental images, then an abstract representation of the brain. Finally, it associates or joins this sequence of movements, in a series of rotating lines on the screen making it a series of linked ideas. The visual part of Processual Video is precisely that; a line which starts off in the horizontal position. It materialises and dematerialises in this position at the beginning and end of the cycle, changing from a series of dashes to a full line, which thickens at the beginning of its movement. It makes a full turn around an imaginary dial. Time is determined by the instability of things - by movement in space. Rotation is a concept that has already appeared in Gary Hill's work. It is a graphic representation of the accomplishment of an action, as, for example, the torsion of the wire in Full Circle. In Processual Video, the repetition of the cycle is linked to the narration, even though each rotation does not correspond to a phase of the story.

  The text expresses mental processes. The first thing to be noticed is the genesis of thoughts in the perceptions: "[´] he grows up there and observes the waves daily, the water always returning [´] the waves going back in themselves [´] his perceptions reflected what he conceptualises to be true". The second element is the distinction of these processes in relation to the different contexts in which the individual finds himself - so that, in situ, the formation and linking of ideas is determined by perception, and, when the individual is back home, by memory. Thus, Gary Hill says: "he stood in the sediments of the text". Finally, the relation is interwoven between the landscape, thought and this video. The line in the narrative represents the horizon line, where the actor finds his concentration. The horizon is not a line in itself. This illusion, caused by visual and spatial perception, defined and reduced in the text in terms of an icon ("a line is an iconic abrasion") is related to the idea of the brain's form: "the outline separating left and or right [´] of the brain never seems to stabilise". Finally, these perceptions and awareness are given relativity by the abstraction in the centre of thought: "his mind was an iconic abbreviation of reality". The line on the screen becomes the representation of the things described, but it also represents the permanent gap between reality and the formation of ideas. If the narrative doesn't speak directly about the image on the screen, the vocabulary directs the spectator to the image seen: "frame", "shift", "line", "a clock", "reaching a top" (underlining the times when the bar is vertical), "iconic abrasion", "abstraction", etc.

Through watching this tape attentively, the spectators have the feeling that they are present at the emergence of this video and that they are coming closer to an understanding of the artist's relation between reality and forms, in the passage taking place here, from the horizon to the line on the screen.

Thérèse Beyler