Mirror Road

»Mirror Road« is one of the few works in which Gary Hill used the Dave Jones Colorizer that was available to him at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York. A colorizer takes a black-and-white video signal and then adds color.

The Dave Jones Colorizer can accept up to six video signals, add a color of separate hue and intensity to each signal, and combine them in a single output. In Mirror Road, Hill manipulates the images of the landscape he is speeding past in his car, using both the view out of the window and the view in the rearview mirror. The original video footage was slowed down using a special time-lapse video recorder. This technology had the side effect of creating slight wave-like movements. This reinforces the impression that the image is tearing or giving way.

»Mirror Road« demonstrates how the artistic process of abstraction is implemented in an electronic medium. The electronic signals can be quantified by a synthesizer and transformed by rules into a form that, by changing the colors and the timing, allows virtually no conclusions to be drawn about the recorded material, the landscape rushing past the car.