ART REVIEW : Sophisticated Video Installations From Gary Hill : Once you’re under the influence of his hypnotic, strangely addictive work, oppositions between intimacy and anonymity, logic and nonsense, no longer hold.

Gary Hill’s four video installations at the Long Beach Museum of Art, collectively called “Sites Recited,” are extremely sophisticated, three-dimensional language-games steeped in the tenets of communication theory and riddled with the contradictions of modern philosophy. As academic as that might sound, his art is anything but inaccessible.

As an analogue for human consciousness, it is most powerful when it departs from the realm of abstract ideas and speaks to viewers intuitively, gripping one with inarticulate sensations that feel as if they drift across your skin, reverberate in your stomach or flicker in your memory--wherever that might be.

Rather than residing tidily in your mind, the effects of Hill’s installations occupy your entire physique. His shifting images and echoing sounds viscerally draw you into open-ended exchanges. Here, ordinary distinctions between inside and out dissolve. Once you’re under the influence of his hypnotic, strangely addictive work, oppositions between intimacy and anonymity, logic and nonsense, no longer hold.

Walking into the first, largest and most resonant piece, “War Zone” (1980), is like stumbling into a giant, Pepto Bismol-coated mouth in which a group of scientists have abandoned equipment from a weird experiment. Two rotating spotlights scan the darkened walls and ceiling, which have been covered with chicken wire and bright pink insulation. Tiny speakers repeatedly whisper the names of each object to which they are affixed--a ladder, movie screen, broom, dolly and fence, among other things. In this alien landscape, a live white rabbit is the only element that seems more out of place than yourself.

A binocular-like pair of video cameras with headphones have been set up on a tripod to let you survey the surreal stage. Your view through the lenses, however, is constantly interrupted by computer-generated images of the props. Loud sounds of video war games simultaneously drown out the soft chorus of whispers.

Hill’s manipulated audio-visual technology obscures and distorts, alienating you even further from an absurd world. Paradoxically, the less you are able to comprehend of the set-up, the more attuned your senses become to its nuances. After a little time passes, you stop trying to put some version of the big picture together, and concentrate, instead, on scrutinizing--and savoring--the work’s peculiar, mind-bending details.

Three other gallery-size installations flesh out Hill’s multilayered exploration of the intersections between sight and sound. “Primarily Speaking” (1981-83), “Cut Pipe” (1992) and “Learning Curve (Still Point)” (1993) present substantial examples of some of the ways meaning mutates as it migrates and digresses.

Seventeen single-channel videos from 1979-1990 add impressive depth to an informative, if compressed survey. In all of Hill’s work, boundaries are permeable, information flows in many directions at once, identity is in flux, and the focus often slips back-and-forth between artist and viewer.

Unconscious associations, mechanistic rhythms and pregnant nonsense outweigh objectivity and detached contemplation. Hill creatively uses high-tech instruments to elicit personal experiences of archetypal simplicity. With his work, the invisible operations of thinking take tangible shape. Perception and cognition circle around one another, engaging their subjects--and us--in poetic dances that defy logic yet make a different kind of sense.