Gary Hill (b. 1951)
Site/Recite (a prologue)(1989)
1989, 4:05 min, color, sound

With startling precision, Site/Recite moves across and around a table-top graveyard - bones, butterfly wings, egg shells, seed pods, crumpled notes, skulls - in a series of seamless edits that present a continuous flow of detailed close-ups. This taxonomy of dispossession, "little deaths that pile up," is juxtaposed to a narration on the linkage between semantic self-consciousness and visual experience. Through the window of this text, the objects on the table come to model how consciousness affixes itself to material manifestations and how memory is constituted by the collection of empty vessels. Site/Recite is a prologue for Which Tree, an interactive videodisc installation that presents viewers with a maze of interconnected branch points, allowing them to wander through its forest of images and words to discover the "texts" of their own thinking patterns.

Voice: Lou Hetler. Camera/Lighting: Rex Barker. Produced by IMATCO/ATANOR for Television Espanola S.A. El Arte de Video.

This title is available for exhibitions, screenings, and institutional use through Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY. Please visit the EAI Online Catalogue for further information about this artist and work. The EAI site offers extensive resources for curators, students, artists and educators, including: an in-depth guide to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving media art; A Kinetic History: The EAI Archives Online, a collection of essays, primary documents, and media charting EAI's 40-year history and the early years of the emergent video art scene; and expanded contextual and educational materials.