There is a story that goes: when the Melbourne-based artist Christopher L.G. Hill was still a high school student he performed with a friend for the end-of-year talent quest. The musical crew called themselves Da Bill Hilly’s, and had prepared their own version of the Beastie Boys’ party anthem ‘Sure Shot’. In a performance recorded to cassette tape and lasting only a matter of seconds, the students replaced the song’s famous percussive opening salvo: ‘Because you can’t, you won’t, and you don’t stop,’ with ‘Because you can, you will, and you do stop.’ The intervention abruptly over, the talent quest’s conditioning of schoolkids for participation in the spectacle of pop culture had been momentarily short-circuited by the kids themselves.

With the arrival of modern art, the relationship between art and life became one of frequent contestation. Nowadays, many experiences of the production and consumption of everyday life can be attributed to forms of culture that we generally term ‘new media’. The effect of new media on the dissemination of culture is seemingly no longer up for debate, the blurring of art and life is visible everywhere. The doubly clever prankster attitude that Hill and his partner applied to the Beastie Boys, who were themselves of the first generation of smash-hit samplers, is suggestive of a politics that couples playful activity with a refusal of culture as commodity. Evident in the classmates’ formative jest, this approach to new material continues in Hill’s critical art practice today. In investigating cliched communication and the banalities of corporatised culture, Hill can be seen as one representative of a current generation of artists who use ‘new media’ but also question the very idea of ‘newness’. In his poetic and installation-based artworks Hill attempts to counter the anaesthetic tendency of the  media cycle. In this way, he pursues an open, critical practice-oriented form of art, where the language of this approach is an endless aesthetic dialogue.