The sound of a voice comes out of a loudspeaker that fills the entire image plane. Then a hand filled with sand enters the picture and slowly allows the sand to trickle into the cone of the loudspeaker. Every sound generated by the cone catapults the grains of sand lying on it up into the air.

The spoken text takes up what the images are showing : “A hand enters the picture”. “A voice loses sground”. With the aid of the grains of sand, Hill makes the voice visible, thereby creating a completely new correlation between acoustic and visual perception. The land allows more and more sand to trickle onto the loudspeaker until the cone is totally buried beneath it.

While this is happening, the voice increasingly changes its character, in the end reaching the viewer only as a completely muffled sound and whispering to him/her that a voice lies buried here in the sand.

Catalogue Gary Hill, Selected Works + Catalogue raisonné, edition Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002