Margaret Morse is professor of film and digital media at UC Santa Cruz and the author of Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture.

In the work of Gary Hill, language is the buoyant medium upon which consciousness floats. Over the past twenty-five years, Hill has amassed a revelatory collection of videotapes investigating the properties of language with rare insight, beauty, and visual complexity. Videograms (1980–81, 13:27 mins, B&W) is an early series of text-and-image sketches using the Rutt/Etra synthesizer, an instrument that allowed Hill to generate complementary abstract forms on a monitor. Often employing a split-screen structure, Primarily Speaking (1981–83, 19:23 mins) looks at the way in which language shifts with context, the binocular images and sounds producing rifts in meaning. Hill's exquisitely rendered Incidence of Catastrophe (1987, 43:50 mins), inspired by Maurice Blanchot's novel Thomas the Obscure, deploys a striking pictorial regime in which a speechless protagonist finds voice through redolent images. Overwhelmed by the limitations of words, Hill's hero retreats into a silent stupor, the last refuge of imbeciles and saints. Hill explores the space where consciousness and language commingle in this muted testament to a man witnessing his own senses. In the fanciful Site/Recite (1989, 4 mins), a tabletop of discarded objects-eggshells, a skull, butterfly wings, a seed pod-is scrutinized in a wave of seamless close-ups. The poetic narration, linked through cadence to the camera's movements, muses on the contiguity of perception and lingual self-awareness.