The electronic media has two languages: onecreated in the service of broadcast television, the other, anidiosyncratic tongue specific to video art. The highly influential, NewYork-based artist Dara Birnbaum has handily disrobed one language whiledressing the other. Dating back to 1978, her earliest videoworksundermined the embedded agenda of commercial television. Throughextraction and repetition, appropriated TV footage divulged its cache ofarrested desire. In Wonder Woman (1978), for instance, the magical whirlcreating this alleged heroine is broken down as a recurring gesture,revealing the empty, but blinding promise of transformation. Kojak/Wang(1980) juxtaposes a super-charged shoot-out from the cop show with thelaser blast from a computer ad. Here, the explicit violence ofcommercial TV is reinforced by the implicit violence of a TV commercial.By the early eighties, Birnbaum abandoned the conventional vocabulary oftelevision for an idiom belonging very much to video as an avant-gardetool. In the Damnation of Faust Trilogy (1983-87), she melded a myth oflonging and innocence with sensual, medium-specific effects. Startlingimages depict a world that is both visually hellish and balleticallygraceful. What unites Birnbaum's apparently disparate modes ofaddress-appropriation and origination-is an ambitious attempt to"talk back to the media," using the voice of resistance. SteveSeid Dara Birnbaum will screen her videotapes, aswell as show slides of video installations. The complementary discussionwill include Birnbaum's latest project, a permanent outdoor videoinstallation now being constructed in Atlanta, Georgia.