Dara Birnbaum's provocative video works are influential and innovative contributions to the contemporary discourse on art and television. In her videotapes and multi-media installations, Birnbaum applies both low-end and high-end video technology to subvert, critique or deconstruct the power of mass media images and gestures to define mythologies of culture, history and memory.

Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the "real" woman's sy ...

Birnbaum manipulates off-air imagery from the TV game show Hollywood Squares in Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry, a bold deconstruction of the gestures of sexual representation in pop cultural imagery and music. Minor celebrities (who Birnbaum terms "iconic women and receding men") confi ...

Local TV News Analysis is the document of a collaborative project of Graham and Birnbaum, in which they investigate local television news, both in form and content. Three simultaneo ...

In the dynamic Pop-Pop Video works, Birnbaum appropriates standard television genres — the soap opera, sports event, action drama — to deconstruct the idiomatic meaning of TV's structural codes and conventions, such as the intercut and reverse shot.

Commissioned by Remy Martin for a public exhibition in Grand Central Station in New York, Remy/Grand Central is an advertisement with a deconstructive twist. In a syncopated collage of appropriated footage (including a TV commercial for Sergio Valente jeans) and a young woman drinking Remy on ...

Commissioned by VideoGram International, Ltd., for a videodisc of music by Jimi Hendrix, Fire! uses the stylized visuals and pacing of a music video to critique the representational economies of sexuality and consumerism. Translating the psychedelic fervor of the Hendrix song into a contemp ...

PM Magazine/Acid Rock is a spectacle of visuals and sound, a delirious collage of appropriated TV imagery and dynamic pop music. The introduction to the nightly television broadcast PM Magazine and a segment of a Wang computer commercial are the sources for the highly edited and comput ...

Evocation is the prologue of the three-part series Damnation of Faust, in which Birnbaum transforms the Faustian myth into a dreamlike introspection on the duality of the internalized self and the external world. A playground scene, shot in the streets of lower Manhattan, is the work's ...

A woman gazing through a window, reflecting on a romantic loss and betrayal, gives voice to Marguerite, the female character from the Faust legend. Will-o'-the-Wisp, the second part of Birnbaum's trilogy, is an eloquent reverie on memory and reality. A woven construct of deception and aban ...

Produced for an Artbreak segment on MTV Network, this dynamic "thirty-second spot" presents an abbreviated history of animation according to the representation of women, from the cell imagery of Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series to the contemporary digital effects of television.

In the third part of the Damnation of Faust trilogy, Birnbaum shifts her focus from the individual to the social being, as she examines the collusion of personal history and collective memory through technology and mediated images.

In Canon: Taking to the Streets, Birnbaum breaks with traditional documentary format. Using tools from the low-end and high-end of technology, she episodically views recent events of student activism in the United States. This is a study of the 1987 Take Back the Night march on the Pri ...

Birnbaum swiftly traces the geopolitical history of the U.S and then France, charting their constant reconfigurations across maps rendered malleable through special effects. A densely layered soundtrack guides the viewer through this "anti-terrain," in which boundaries are arbitrary and national identities unstable.

Produced for an Artbreak segment on MTV Network, this dynamic "thirty-second spot" presents an abbreviated history of animation according to the representation of women, from the cell imagery of Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series to the contemporary digital effects of television.

In Canon: Taking to the Streets, Birnbaum breaks with traditional documentary format. Using tools from the low-end and high-end of technology, she episodically views recent events of student activism in the United States. This is a study of the 1987 Take Back the Night march on the Pri ...

In the third part of the Damnation of Faust trilogy, Birnbaum shifts her focus from the individual to the social being, as she examines the collusion of personal history and collective memory through technology and mediated images.

Evocation is the prologue of the three-part series Damnation of Faust, in which Birnbaum transforms the Faustian myth into a dreamlike introspection on the duality of the internalized self and the external world. A playground scene, shot in the streets of lower Manhattan, is the work's ...

A woman gazing through a window, reflecting on a romantic loss and betrayal, gives voice to Marguerite, the female character from the Faust legend. Will-o'-the-Wisp, the second part of Birnbaum's trilogy, is an eloquent reverie on memory and reality. A woven construct of deception and aban ...

Commissioned by VideoGram International, Ltd., for a videodisc of music by Jimi Hendrix, Fire! uses the stylized visuals and pacing of a music video to critique the representational economies of sexuality and consumerism. Translating the psychedelic fervor of the Hendrix song into a contemp ...

General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating is a fragmented collage that cuts between two sources of off-air television imagery - the TV sports event and the soap opera - to analyze the syntax and gestures of what Birnbaum terms "TV treatment" - in this case, the cross-cut and the reverse shot.

Birnbaum manipulates off-air imagery from the TV game show Hollywood Squares in Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry, a bold deconstruction of the gestures of sexual representation in pop cultural imagery and music. Minor celebrities (who Birnbaum terms "iconic women and receding men") confi ...

Layered with a tension-laden crescendo of rock guitars and gunshots, Kojak/Wang is a volatile pastiche of fast-paced, repeated images from Kojak (commercial TV), an ad for the Wang Corporation (TV commercial), and color bars. Birnbaum equates the violence of the crime drama shoot-out and the violence of corporate America.

Local TV News Analysis is the document of a collaborative project of Graham and Birnbaum, in which they investigate local television news, both in form and content. Three simultaneo ...

PM Magazine/Acid Rock is a spectacle of visuals and sound, a delirious collage of appropriated TV imagery and dynamic pop music. The introduction to the nightly television broadcast PM Magazine and a segment of a Wang computer commercial are the sources for the highly edited and comput ...

In the dynamic Pop-Pop Video works, Birnbaum appropriates standard television genres — the soap opera, sports event, action drama — to deconstruct the idiomatic meaning of TV's structural codes and conventions, such as the intercut and reverse shot.

Commissioned by Remy Martin for a public exhibition in Grand Central Station in New York, Remy/Grand Central is an advertisement with a deconstructive twist. In a syncopated collage of appropriated footage (including a TV commercial for Sergio Valente jeans) and a young woman drinking Remy on ...

Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the "real" woman's sy ...

This international public art project reflects a broad spectrum of cultural, national, racial and ethnic diversity in America and France today. Created by seven American and seven French artists, these 60-second "spots" are transcultural investigations into national and cultural identity, video mess ...

Birnbaum swiftly traces the geopolitical history of the U.S and then France, charting their constant reconfigurations across maps rendered malleable through special effects. A densely layered soundtrack guides the viewer through this "anti-terrain," in which boundaries are arbitrary and national identities unstable.

The television production Two Moon July was a multidisciplinary event that featured experimental video, film, visual art, performance and music in a theatrical framework. More than thirty artists participated in the program, which reads like a "who's who" of 1980s downtown art icons. The event includes performances by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Arto Lindsay, Bill T. Jones; music by Brian Eno and Philip Glass; art by Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, and video by Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum and Bill Viola, among many others.

In celebration of the LP release of Constructive Engagement, a collection of audio works using field recordings from demonstrations at the 2002 World Economic Forum and other recent political protests, free103point9, in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), presented an evening of polit...

EAI and Dia presented a free open-air screening of video works by Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham. The screening, which took place at Graham's Urban Rooftop Park Project at Dia, featured individual works by each artist, a collaborative piece, and the premiere of Birnbaumís Attack Piece, a 1975 two-moni...

Dia and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presented a day-long screening of video works from EAI's collection. The videos screened featured works by artists who participated in collaborative programming presented by Dia and EAI at Dia:Chelsea from the mid-1990s until 2004. Artists included Marina Abram...

EAI partnered with Y-3 to present a program of video works from the EAI collection on the exterior of Y-3's newly opened location in Miami's Design District. Inside the Y-3 store, in its second level event space, an indoor video program featuring the influential and provocative video works of Dara B...

EAI participated in The NY Art Book Fair 2009, organized by Printed Matter at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. EAI's project space, installed in P.S.1's basement vault, presented FREE TRADE, a program of videos exploring economies of exchange in a globalized world: the circulation of art, ideas, infor...

EAI and Rooftop Films collaborated on a screening of works involving direct television intervention. Rooftop films is a community-oriented film festival whose mission is to "bring the underground outdoors."

Videos by artists who explore the strange phenomena that can arise from living closely with melodrama and television, including Dara Birnbaum, Shana Moulton, Michael Smith, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

As the keystone of EAI's 30th anniversary events, Museum of Modern Art presented First Decade: Video from the EAI Archives, a major retrospective that looked at the early days of video through EAI's historical collection. Featuring 60 works, the twelve-part program explored themes and issues ranging...

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presented a series of video programs at The Park Avenue Armory during the 20th annual Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). EAI invited the first year graduate students in ...

Mediated Presence: Three Decades of Artists' Video from Electronic Arts Intermix is a three-part survey, spanning the years 1967 to 1997, that explores the rich and diverse modes by which artists use video to investigate self. Tracing how artists have articulated a mediated relationship with the vie...

This special open-air video screening on the Hudson River at Pier 63 Maritime included alternative music-videos and music-based video by artists. The artists in the program included Cory Arcangel, Charles Atlas, Michael Bell-Smith, Johanna Billing, Dara Birnbaum, Meredith Danluck, Devin Flynn, Shana...

EAI's program of alternative music-videos and music-based video by artists traveled to Art Basel Miami Beach. Screened at Art Positions' Open Air Cinema, the program included videos by Cory Arcangel, Charles Atlas, Michael Bell-Smith, Johanna Billing, Dara Birnbaum, Meredith Danluck, Devin Flynn, Sh...

EAI celebrated the art of short-form video and film with a summer screening of works that clock in at two minutes or less. Between Yoko Ono's fifteen second Eye Blink (1966) and Leslie Thornton's two minute Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 6 (2006), the forty-five works in this forty-f...

Interview between Cory Arcangel and Dara Birnbaum in March 2009 Artforum.

Press release for free open-air screening of video works by Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham presented by EAI and DIA in June 2002.

Article on Dara Birnbaum in Bomb Magazine's Summer 2008 issue.