AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

For more than 50 years, American artist Gary Hill has pushed the boundaries of moving image art and technology. An early innovator of video art and interactive computer-based installations, Hill’s work has been foundational to the development of intermedia and expanded cinema. This presentation focuses on the recent conservation of Hill’s Tall Ships (1992), a sixteen-channel interactive video installation built upon the combination of custom analog and digital technologies, now migrated to newer technologies while maintaining the unique imaging system at the core of the work.

Tall Ships was originally commissioned for the exhibition documenta IX in Kassel, Germany in 1992 and would go on to tour the world throughout the following decade. Tall Ships consists of sixteen black-and-white CRT projectors custom-built by the artist that hang in a long, completely dark corridor. Each projector is connected to one of sixteen laserdisc players that are controlled by a DOS-based computer with software coded by multimedia designer and frequent collaborator Dave Jones. Appearing in the image of each projection is a person sitting in the distance. When visitors walk into the corridor, the only light emitted comes from these faint figures. The images are high contrast yet soft with an ethereal quality, with no border framing the projection. As a visitor walks closer to the image, their steps trigger electronic switches in the floor that then signal the figures in the video to get up and walk toward the visitor, meeting them face-to-face. The figures stand there, life-size, wavering, staring back at the visitor until the visitor steps away, triggering the figure to also step away and walk back to the distant position where they initially sat.

Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland has worked closely with Small Data Industries of Rochester, New York and artist Gary Hill to conserve the work for future preservation and exhibition. Necessary to its original creation and now its conservation has been tinkering with technologies in unexpected ways. This presentation will walk through the process of maintaining the custom projectors that are essential to the look and feel of this work, while detailing the migration from a DOS-controlled, LaserDisc source to a streamlined Raspberry Pi-based backend, and novel methods that were devised for assessing the fidelity of the new iteration to the original. The authors will also discuss the unexpected positive outcomes of an estimated reduced energy use and carbon footprint for exhibiting the work with the updated technologies. This presentation sheds light on the unique challenges and approaches inherent to working with custom analog and digital moving image technologies and best practices for preparing them for a fast-moving future of ever-evolving time-based media art.