In the center of Seattle artist Gary Hill’s Glass Onion (seen above, at 911 Media Arts Center through Sept 15)—if it could be said to have a center—is a monitor on the floor.

It is surrounded by three concentric rectangles, two of speakers on the floor, and a third, the outermost layer, of upright monitors where images and text appear. The text, a complex sentence having to do with “the frame of reference within a rectangle,” is heard in a scrolling incantation that moves around the speakers and also crawls across the bottom of the monitors.

Although the installation seems designed to undermine the traditional notion of a kernel of pure meaning at the center of something, the monitor in the center of the room does feel like the center, or the epicenter, or the center of the episode of Glass Onion.

Mounted on the ceiling directly above the monitor is a camera with an automatic zoom. As it continually self-corrects in zooming in on the monitor, the rectangles that appear on the monitor keep growing smaller and smaller, and the camera approaches something like maximum self-consciousness. It freaks out, and basically pulls back out to screen size and starts over. The images this generates are beautiful and mind-blowing.”It’s as though, staring itself in the eye until all surfaces catastrophize, the image can no longer hold the information of its pure reflection,” the poet George Quasha wrote in a prose piece that goes along with the installation, which was first seen in Seattle at and/or, the predecessor of 911 Media Arts, in 1981. “In what sense can the mind monitor its own activity? Does it know itself only in bouncing back from an other? Can it think directly and what happens when it tries?”

You the visitor are a part of this whole thing, too, because the installation picks up your presence, too, and circulates your image around the room. It begins to feel like a closed system, this rectangle, like what is inside this rectangle is an endless task—figuring out the words, following the images, watching the camera frustrate itself, finding your place.

If you saw this piece in 1981, it’s worth revisiting. Hill entirely reworked the presentation to make it digital. Maybe he’ll do a podcast with me to explain how and talk more about Glass Onion (which seems to me superior to—and gloriously nerdier than—the piece of his on view at SAM, House of Cards).

Two other typically mind-mining pieces of Hill’s are on view at 911 Media Arts Center (open Monday through Friday noon to 6) in a show curated by new executive director Misha Neininger: Clover (1994, top image below), a quadrupling of a man walking in the forest; and Twofold (Goats and Sheep) (1995/2002), a doubling of a man signing language and speaking (so, a multiple multiplying). Three works of another artist would be a small number; with Hill, they’re an afternoon.

If these intrigue, go tomorrow to the Henry Art Gallery and descend the stairs into the lower floor, where Hill’s early two-channel video installation, Facing Faces (1996), continues the mindplay. It’s one man on two screens—one is always looking at the other.