Birnbaum Dara
born in 1946
media artist, visual artist, videographer, teacher, designer, producer, photographer
Dara Birnbaum was born in 1947 in the United States. An urban architect trained at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the San Francisco Art Institute, she began to use video in 1978 after teaching experience at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where Dan Graham also worked.
Dara Birnbaum is considered one of the most innovative figures in the contemporary discourse on art in relation to television. The medium has a strong presence in her video works and multimedia installations as she uses the technology to subvert and deconstruct the power of image in the media.
Using the dynamic language of television, she analyses its ideological significance and proposes video as a medium which gives voice to individuality.In her early works, influenced by the current critical of the media towards the end of the 1970s, she uses a strategy of dismantling the codes of media representation, transforming them into a critique of stereotypes and the treatment of the essential values of entertainment.
In Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-1979) she uses a comic book heroine to recontextualise television genres, showing the roles of the hero and the female ego.
In the 1980s, she began a process of analysis of the metaphoric and expressive power of video technology. In the trilogy Damnation of Faust, Birnbaum rearticulates the romantic myth of Faust by making the main character a female role.
Her use of wipes, windows within windows, fades and slow motion effects acquire the status of narrative resources, and Birnbaum is considered to be one of the first artists to use appropriated and deconstructed television imagery. Birnbaum is a regular collaborator of the MTV independent television network, where she has produced many of her works.
The interactive piece Rio Videowall, completed in 1989 and shown at the Commercial Centre of Atlanta, is considered her most emblematic work and one of the first public electronic pieces to be shown in the United States.
Dara Birnbaum has won awards and grants from a number of institutions and her artistic career has helped consolidate television art as one of the most important branches of videoart.
source: http://www.mediatecaonline.net/
