“..And here.. David Hall's Progressive Recession of 1974.. a piece that uses live feed from nine
cameras to the monitors beneath them - to set up expectations of what you'll see - only to frustrate
them. A piece as important in the evolution of British video art as Bruce Nauman's Going Round
the Corner was to the American scene..”
David Curtis, 'Which History', Tate International Council Conference, 2001

"David Hall's Progressive Recession, first installed in the Serpentine Gallery in 1975, is a good
example of the revision of 'locatedness' and reception in practices associated with expanded
cinema. As the viewer moves through the space, he/she is progressively distanced from his/her
image. The image is not being recorded but is being played or fed back by what Hall calls the
'analogical mirror' of the video-camera-monitor circuit. Suddenly, video made possible an
instantaneous sense of interaction pointing to a new set of spatial and temporal conditions to be
considered in terms of any new 'cinematic environment'. Like Bruce Nauman, Tina Keane or
Stephen Partridge, David Hall created a potentially participatory piece in which the viewer becomes
part of the work. Symptomatic of an altered field of authorship, the subject of the piece becomes
the role of the viewer observing not only the work but his or her engagement with it."
Duncan White, Expanded Cinema: The Live Record, Expanded Cinema, Tate Publishing, 2011.

“..Progressive Recession (1974) was, I assume, something of a revelation for the majority of
visitors, including those, like me, who were aware of the work but had only seen it through
documentation. This cannot prepare one for the profound revelation that participation in the work
inspires. Its structure is deceptively simple: nine monitors arranged in a row of seven with one set
at 90 degrees to the row at each end, a live camera on top of each monitor, feeding others
progressively down the row, and with the two end monitor cameras feeding each other. This dry
description cannot anticipate the discombobulating electronic hall of mirrors-cum-maze
experienced when alone, or the complex technologically mediated mesh of social relations when
the room is full of people. When the fourth monitor!s camera was showing its image on a monitor
three ahead in the row, cognitive dissonance arose from the confusion of viewing another visitor!s
face where one might plausibly assume one!s own 'mirror' image to be. Rather than reiterate a
notion of a televisual public as a disembodied network of passive viewers experiencing a medium
as individual consumers, this is something like a closed-circuit microcosm for the potential of a
social space created by screen-based media. Hall was playfully inventing a possible alternative
use for the live feedback of the image in video and partly anticipating more recent online
developments such as Skype. The piece was lovingly recreated at the Ambika P3 gallery [March –
April 2012] using vintage analogue video equipment, but the experience was fresh and utterly
contemporary in the moment of participation; this in spite of the innumerable everyday encounters
with public CCTV and screens in urban streetscapes, now, in the twenty-first century.
An often-reproduced image of the work!s first exhibition in The Video Show (Serpentine Gallery,
London 1975) shows a Girl Guide group interacting with the installation, a reminder that it always
has been Hall!s intention to wrest the art away from an 'elite' audience towards broader conceptual
and physical accessibility. Progressive Recession might draw comparison with Bruce Nauman!s
1970 closed-circuit video installation Going Around the Corner Piece, in which visitors were always
a few tail-chasing steps behind their images captured by apparently ubiquitous surveillance
cameras. The work created a sculptural collision of interior space and surveillance. By comparison,
Hall!s Progressive Recession is more concerned with spatiality and spectatorship, displacement
and the problematic of the work of art.
Steven Ball, Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Vol 2 No 1, Intellect Books, 2013.

“In the corridor configuration utilising nine CCTV cameras and nine monitors Progressive
Recession is an early live interactive video installation where viewers, interacting with their own
image, become collaborators in the realisation of the work... With the advent of video technology at
the turn of the 1970s I recognised a unique potential (in instant image feedback) to explore
relationships of hitherto unapproachable psychological innovation and response.” DH, 1996