In the 1970s Holt’s interest in framing vision and making words material led her to explore the productive miscommunications that take place when information is imperfectly transferred from one medium to another. The four-screen video installation Points of View (1974) reveals, as she notes in her journal, “the wonder of place through verbal description.” Points of View was made for the Clocktower Gallery in New York.

Holt’s ​Underscan ​features photographs from her Aunt Ethel’s home in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and excerpts of her aunt’s letters, which Holt reads aloud. The photographs were videotaped, and re-videotaped while being “underscanned” – a process used in video editing that Holt described in Art-Rite magazine (November-December 1974) as “a structural framework particular only to video; it compresses the picture so that the edges can be seen precisely; it does away with the variation that occurs between monitors in the amount of the image which is visible. [. . .