Soundings

Gary Hill

1979 | 00:17:41 | United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 |

Collection: Single Titles

"Soundings is a meditation on the phenomenology of sound, the translation of image into sound and sound into image through a series of experiments on an audio speaker. The speaker delivers sound both audibly and visibly, with the camera revealing the minute vibrations of the speaker’s cone. Referring to the cloth covering of the speaker as a 'skin', Hill intones, 'This is the skin of space where I voice from'. The materialized voice is clearly an extension of the artist’s intention. Hill proceeds to bury, puncture, burn, and drown the audio speaker in an effort to physically alter or overwhelm the sound coming out of it, the sound of his own voice. Each carefully constructed experiment explores the confluence of sound, image, and text, suggesting a kind of concretized poetry or 'electronic linguistics'.”

—Lucinda Furlong, “A Manner of Speaking: An Interview with Gary Hill,” Afterimage 10:8 (March 1983)

This title is only available on Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1.