With so much of everyday life under the dominion of mass media, the relevance of critical inquiries into the media's apparatus can only be renewed. Hence the perennial necessity of viewing the presidential campaign with a thoughtful, skeptical, and historically informed eye. Muntadas's Political Advertisements 2000 (shown at PFA last November) reinvigorates his interest in tracking the transformation of power into pure image. Similarly, throughout his videoworks, Muntadas has recontextualized mass media imagery in order to divulge the "invisible mechanisms" that inform meaning. With Muntadas's presence in the BAM galleries, we take this opportunity to revisit his astute works which scrutinize a stream of information intended to be consumed whole by an unsuspecting public. These rigorous investigations take footage from television and film and shift its reception through such visual strategies as repetition, distortion, and fragmentation. By creating a breach in the "media flow," Muntadas also creates a breach in the contract between transmission and reception.-Steve Seid