TECHNOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION: WONDER WOMAN

by Dara Birnbaum (1978-1979)



Video (color, sound), 5:50 min. Original Television Footage: CBS Inc. “Wonder Woman”.  Sound: The Wonderland Disco Band



Welcome to an appropriation themed video week. Let’s start with a pioneering example of “video sampling”: Dara Birnbaum’s iconic work “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” from 1979 is utilizing footage snatched from broadcasts of the live-action super hero show of the same name.

Dara Birnbaum created one of the first examples of appropriation imagery from mainstream television, something that is now quite common. “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” features, as one might expect, Wonder Woman, the main character of the prime-time television programm of the same name which was based on an action-adventure comic book.

Explosive bursts of fire open ”Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman”, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the “real” woman’s symbolic transformation into super-hero. Entrapped in her magical metamorphosis by Birnbaum’s stuttering edits, Wonder Woman spins dizzily like a music-box doll. Through radical manipulation of this female Pop icon, she subverts its meaning within the television text. Arresting the flow of images through fragmentation and repetition, Birnbaum condenses the comic-book narrative — Wonder Woman deflects bullets off her bracelets, “cuts” her throat in a hall of mirrors — distilling its essence to allow the subtext to emerge. In a further textual deconstruction, she spells out the words to the song Wonder Woman in Discoland on the screen. The lyrics’ double entendres (”Get us out from under … Wonder Woman”) reveal the sexual source of the superwoman’s supposed empowerment: “Shake thy Wonder Maker.” Writing about the “stutter-step progression of `extended moments’ of transformation from Wonder Woman,” Birnbaum states, “The abbreviated narrative — running, spinning, saving a man — allows the underlying theme to surface: psychological transformation versus television product. Real becomes Wonder in order to “do good” (be moral) in an (a) or (im)moral society.”

To see wonderwoman spinning around, click on the link below. Enjoy.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4y5e5_dara-birnbaum-technologytransformat_shortfilms