Hill's Electronic Vocabulary

Gary Hill uses video as a way to understand or take apart or deconstruct language. He then applies his knowledge of language to “create a link between images and electronics”. How does he accomplish this? How do his videos change or potentially change how we view or understand language? 

Gary Hill used video as a way to show how a linguistic system can be translated into the audiovisual displays in digital formats. He began his experiments with semiotics and explored with linguistic insertions, sounds, syllables, and spoken words in his videos, trying to discover new contexts of meanings above the linguistic level. In the aim of creating a link between images and electronics, Hill exemplified his concept in his early experiment, Electronic Linguistics (1978). He translated electronic sound signals into a “language of imagery”, and by recording the digital signals he represented and visualized his transcription process at the same time. In the experiment, he made his digital “monadic” structure grew into something intensive in the screen, demonstrating the energy and productivity of one single basic unit that make happen to any bigger phrases, which was the working system in both cyber world and linguistics world.

His work Primary (1978) inspired me mostly. When seeing the speaking mouths flashing with corresponding colors and spoken letters, I found myself very unconscious about the speaking worlds and the colors, and especially the relationship between the two parts. I was questioning the very first invention of the word “red”, “blue”, and “green”. They can mean something different if the inventor put another meaning on that certain word. The language is a system of relationships between visualized characters and their decided meanings. But when we watch something in a fast flow and the visual part is very dominant, we may ignore the sound and the meaning behind the spoken language. I’m wondering if the color on screen was green while the spoken word was red, will I feel strange or will I ever notice that? The relationship between words and their meanings are so fragile because people manipulated them, and they can easily change by the differences in cultures and times. While people’s understanding and recognition toward certain things or knowledge are based on linguistic definition and language system, just as we would respond to the real color of red when we hear the word “red”, but what if the really color of blood was not called as red but as green? How would that change people’s knowledge system? Or what should be the right or the correct relationship between words and meanings? Or why does it matter to us?