Gary Hill - Mediations (towards a remake of Soundings), 1986.

Video (color, stereo sound)
Original format: U-matic
Running time: 4:17 min.

Color video camera/recorder, two microphones, audio mixer, speaker and sand

"The beginning of a remake of an earlier work [Soundings, 1979] in which I wanted to extend the reflexivity of each text in relation to the interaction between different physical substances—in this case, sand—and the speaker cone. A loudspeaker fills the screen and I begin to speak, referring to the speaker itself. This is followed by more declarations of what I am doing, '...a hand enters the picture....' A hand filled with sand enters the picture and slowly releases it into the loudspeaker's cone. Every nuance of speech vibrates the speaker's cone (or membrane), bouncing the grains of sand into the air. The more I speak about what is happening, the more it changes—or feeds back into—the movement and patterns of the sand. At times the grain of the voice seemingly merges with what is experienced as 'sand.' The hand allows more and more sand to trickle onto the loudspeaker until the cone is no longer visible. The timbre of the voice crackles and is radically muffled. When the speaker is completely buried, the voice sounds distant but remarkably clear." - Gary Hill

An Art of Limina: Gary Hill's Works and Writings, by George Quasha and Charles Stein (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009)