A profusion of formal inventiveness comes to the fore in these four seminal works. Dara Birnbaum's The Damnation of Faust: Evocation (1983, 10 mins) is the prologue to a triptych about the disharmony between the self and the external world. Using elegant fan wipes invented for the tape, Birnbaum conjoins our dualistic experiences of past and present, memory and reality, revealing strained continuities, then, with the precision of a fan, teasingly withdrawing these insights. Ken Feingold led the pack with Un Chien Delicieux (1991, 18:45 mins), a faux documentary in which a Thai villager visits Paris and befriends André Breton. The great Surrealist breaks with culinary custom to doggedly celebrate their friendship. Daniel Reeves's A Mosaic for the Kali Yuga (1986, 5 mins) is a relentless shock of media fragments, evoking Vishnu Parnan's prophecy that spirituality will succumb to confusion. One of the most original of videoworks, Gary Hill's Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (1984, 33 mins) uses Gregory Bateson's concept of the metalogue-an argument that mirrors its own form-to look at the ordering of experience. By writing his dialogue backwards, then reversing it in playback, Hill dramatizes the paradox that order is a product, not a progenitor, of language.