Thursday, December 9
10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., continuously
The screening is free and open to all.
Dara Birnbaum’s video works are among
the most influential and innovative contributions to contemporary
discourse on art and television. In her videotapes and  multimedia
installations, Birnbaum applies both low-end and high-end video
technology to subvert, critique, or deconstruct the power
of mass media images and gestures in order to define mythologies
of culture, history, and memory.
Analyzing TV’s idiomatic grammar (reverse shot, crosscuts,
inserts) and genres (game shows, sitcoms, crime dramas), she
recontextualized pop cultural icons — Kojak, General
Hospital — through fragmentation and repetition. She
writes: "By dislocating the visuals and altering the syntax,
these images were cut from the narrative flow and countered with
musical texts, plunging the viewer headlong into the very experience
of TV — unveiling TV’s stereotypical gestures of power
and submission, of self-presentation and concealment, of male
and female egos."  These
groundbreaking works often focus on the representation of women. |
Works
to be screened
In the mid-1980s Birnbaum began exploring the metaphorical
and expressive potential of video technologies. In the Damnation
of Faust trilogy, she articulates the Romantic Faustian myth
through a female voice, as a catalyst for introspections into
the conflict between inner and external worlds, loss and memory.
Drawing on her background in architecture and painting, she invents
new pictorial devices to extend her evocative narrative content.
 Exploring
how technology and media function in culture through a collusion
of art and television, Birnbaum has produced works for contexts
ranging from public sites to MTV. In 1989 she completed the
Rio Videowall, a permanent, large-scale outdoor video installation,
consisting of a 25-monitor interactive wall, at the Rio shopping/entertainment
complex in Atlanta, Georgia.
Text from Electronic
Arts Intermix, "Online Catalogue: Dara
Birnbaum" 1999. Reprinted, with modifications, by permission
of Electronic Arts Intermix. |
