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 Woodstock, New York, 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 ). 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).\n', '

Art historian Lynne Cooke summarizes:\n', '

The sheer richness and complexity of the artist\'s work over four decades is open to continual further characterization. As an artist working from a core principle, often with strong conceptual aspects, his inner focus and dialogue within a given medium allows him high variability and unpredictability. Working with one or more principles at a time (e.g., the physicality of the medium and of languaging and imaging; liminality or the intense space between contraries and extremes of appearance), he can make it happen on multiple planes simultaneously—physical, personal, ontological, social, political—without reification of any one of them. Result: a singular event of reflexive speaking that marries mind and machine beyond any notion of reference as such—no stable signifier or signified, yet intense engagement at personal, emotional, and intellectual levels. Later works in computer animation—e.g., Liminal Objects (1995-), Frustrum (2006)—challenge one\'s sense of "object" and mind-body boundaries and the very basis of our "reality." Major projective installations—Tall Ships (1992), HanD HearD (1995–96), Viewer (1996), Wall Piece (2000), Up Against Down (2008)—raise these issues of physicality, objectivity, polyvalent signification, and language itself to a further human dimension—a principle of torsional engagement both within one\'s own mind and body and up against the surface and face of the other. \n', '

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