Even though it’s the video that launched a million art school knock-offs, Dana Birnbaum’s Technology Transformation looks as fresh and spectacular today as it did in 1979. Birnbaum was one of the first to recycle TV footage and reedit it into a new video, one that both comments and distances itself from its source. Through a repetitive reediting of a scene of Wonder Woman undergoing her transformation into a superhero, Birnbaum creates a work whose length belies its range of commentary. It’s a piece that touches on the nature of television, the progress of technology, and our utopian belief in it. In addition, it’s a video whose technique quickly developed a new vocabulary for the arts.
Because you’re patient helping world being less injured in it pull up skirt hard inside simple folding burnt my finger putting you out
Truce
Like to complicate my life no I don’t sleep all day full pail & feather your hair grinding sea for Texas decades, sure I might be a fuck-up awesome fuck-up
Two poems from New York City poet John Coletti’s new book “Mum Halo.”
In ‘pause’, the work depicts the juxtaposition of powerful machines which are symbols of advancement and technology against nature which is widely accepted as precious and untouched. The medium of photography provides a visual dichotomy of reality and illusion through the aesthetics of plane and tree and their spatial relationship. Planes behind trees as individual objects are familiar and common, but when combined and interrelated, the viewer moves to a new space to behold the unexpected.
