Earth Pulse, 1975
Video (color and black-and-white, sound); 5:30 min.
Black-and-white video camera, unknown broken keyer, Paik/Abe video synthesizer with wobulator, microphone, and EMS synthi AKS
A humanoid form strikes its body while making primal guttural sounds. At times the form is “stopped” and “started” using the pause of a reel-to-reel video player—a frozen line of noise (an asynchronous frame) cuts through the image reinforcing the sense of physicality. The sounding form is eventually set in an electronically generated landscape with temple-like forms of undulating feedback. Further processing of the voice and additional rhythmic electronic sounds are suggestive of ritual.
“One of a few works I did at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, where one was confronted with an extraordinary array of tools, an overabundance of possibilities, which was precisely what had to be overcome to make anything that mattered the next day. By this time I had already gone through the motions of ‘image processing’ and was looking for a way back to physicality. I turned the camera back on myself, and perhaps more importantly, I vocalized—I felt my body as a resonating chamber—and I was home.”
Quasha, George and Charles Stein. An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009, p. 577.
Group screening. Experimental Television Center, Binghamton, New York, March 23, 1975.
Group screening. Anthology Film Archives, New York, New York, July 26, 1975.
Woodstock Video Expovision, Artists’ Cooperative Gallery, Woodstock Community Video, Woodstock, New York, August 26 – 30, 1975.
Group screening. Artists’ Cooperative Gallery, Woodstock Community Video, Woodstock, New York, August 28, 1975.
“Projects Video VI,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, November 1, 1975 – January 31, 1976.
Annual Avant-Garde Festival of New York, New York, New York, 1975.
Artists’ TV Lab Invitational Video Expovision ’77, Arnolfini Arts Center, Rhinebeck, New York, October 7 – 9, 1977.
Solo exhibition. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, May 24 – June 15, 1986.
“Tribute to the Experimental Television Center,” Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY, July 15, 2011.
"The Experimental Television Center: A History, Etc...," Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, New York, September 25 — November 21, 2015
"Signal to Code," Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithica, New York, September 9 — December 18, 2016
Furlong, Lucinda. "A Manner of Speaking: An Interview with Gary Hill." Afterimage 10, 8 (March 1983), p. 10.
Gary Hill. Selected Videography. Program notes. Tokyo: JICS Plaza Video and International Community Services, 1984, unpaginated.
Hanhardt, John G. Gary Hill. The New American Filmmakers Series 30. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986, unpaginated.
Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné. Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002, GHCR 10, p. 61.
Quasha, George and Charles Stein. An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009, pp. 24, 577.