Today he is best known for internationally exhibited installations and performance art, concerned as much with innovative language as with technology, and for continuing work in a broad range of media.

His longtime work with intermedia explores an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity.

Later in the 1970s, living in Barrytown, New York, interacting with poets/artists George Quasha and Charles Stein, he extended his growing interest in language to a level of poetics and complex text, as well as performance art and collaboration.

[2] From that point, irrespective of whether a given piece uses text, his work in particular instances inquires into the nature of language as intrinsic to electronic/digital technology as art medium.

Art historian Lynne Cooke summarizes: A pioneer in his embrace of the then novel medium of video, Hill distinguished himself through a radical approach that both literally and conceptually deconstructed it.

On other occasions, video tubes mysteriously projected unframed images in dark fields; or from oscillating beacons panning an empty room, text and figure swiveled in anamorphic distortion.

And when his restless curiosity led him to computer based technologies and virtual space in the early Nineties, few of his peers proved so avid or dedicated in exploiting this uncharted terrain for art making.

As an artist working from a core principle, often with strong conceptual aspects, his inner focus and dialogue within a given medium allows him high variability and unpredictability.

Working with one or more principles at a time (e.g., the physicality of the medium and of languaging and imaging; liminality or the intense space between contraries and extremes of appearance), he can make it happen on multiple planes simultaneously—physical, personal, ontological, social, political—without reification of any one of them.

Major projective installations—Tall Ships (1992), HanD HearD (1995–96), Viewer (1996), Wall Piece (2000), Up Against Down (2008)—raise these issues of physicality, objectivity, polyvalent signification, and language itself to a further human dimension—a principle of torsional engagement both within one's own mind and body and up against the surface and face of the other.

His reading of the fiction and philosophical literary essays of Maurice Blanchot, in particular, provided him with ideas relating to the way in which language impinges on phenomenological experience, and a notion of 'the other'.

Hill's work thoroughly exploits the capacity of video to offer complex nonlinear narratives that encourage active engagement on the part of the viewer.

The following works (alphabetical order) may be viewed at Gary Hill's Videos on Vimeo.com: Around & About (1980), Electronic Linguistic (1977), Equal Time (1979), Figuring Grounds (1985/2008), Happenstance (part one of many parts) (1982–83), Incidence of Catastrophe (1987–88), Isolation Tank (2010–11), Mediations (towards a remake of Soundings) (1979/1986), Picture Story (1979), Processual Video (1980), Site Recite (a prologue) (1989), Site Recite (a prologue) (1989), Tale Enclosure (1985), Videograms (1980–81), Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?

After seeing the "New York Painting and Sculpture 1940 – 1970" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, makes a series of mixed media constructions using copper coated steel welding rod, wire mesh, canvas and enamel.

Assists with local cable TV in exchange for equipment use; becomes acquainted with the Videofreeks and Earthscore video groups in upstate New York.

1974-76 Continues working with Woodstock Community Video as Artists TV Lab coordinator supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.

In the first major collaboration with George Quasha, adapts selected Gnostic texts and eventually produces the installation Disturbance (among the jars).

1989 Produces Site Recite (a prologue), commissioned for Spanish Television as part of the series El Arte del Video.

1992 Commissions Dave Jones to design a computer-controlled video switcher for a number of "switch" pieces, the first being Between Cinema and a Hard Place.

Gary Hill, first museum survey exhibition in Europe organized by the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

"Imaging the Brain Closer than the Eyes," an exhibition of recent works, is organized by the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland.

1994-95 Gary Hill, first museum survey exhibition in the United States organized by the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington.

1996-98 Produces Reflex Chamber, the first of a number of works to utilize strobe lights in conjunction with images and spoken text; followed by Midnight Crossing, commissioned by Westfälischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany.

While in residence produces Goats and Sheep, the first single-channel videotape since 1990, for the publication Gary Hill: Around & About: A Performative View, co-published by Éditions du Regard and Fabienne Leclerc of In Situ, Paris.

Performance tour in Poland (Wrocław, Łódź, Poznań) and Czech Republic (Prague) of Mind on the Line in collaboration with George Quasha, Charles Stein, Aaron Miller & Dorota Czerner.