TECHNOLOGY/TRANSFORMATION: WONDER WOMAN
DARA BIRNBAUM, 1978–1979
She keeps spinning. She cannot stop spinning. This is Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. Dara Birnbaum. 1978 to 1979. Birnbaum takes footage directly from the Wonder Woman television series. Lynda Carter. Prime time. Peak cultural saturation. And she isolates one moment. The transformation. Diana Prince spins — flash of light — Wonder Woman appears. Birnbaum loops it. Loops it again. Strips out everything else. No plot. No villain. No resolution. Just the spin. The explosion. The spin. The explosion. In 1978 this is not how you use television footage. You don't steal it. You don't recut it. You definitely don't put it in a gallery and call it art. Birnbaum does all three. Without asking. But here's what the loop reveals. The transformation was always the point. The show knew it. The audience knew it. Nobody needed the episode. They needed the spin. The moment a woman becomes something the world cannot ignore. And then — in the actual show — she's immediately given a mission. A problem to solve. A man to rescue. The power gets redirected before she can just stand there and have it. Birnbaum removes the redirect. Just leaves the becoming. On loop. And what looked like empowerment on Tuesday nights at nine starts to look like something else entirely. A woman trapped in the act of transformation. Never allowed to arrive. Just endlessly becoming. Endlessly spectacular. Endlessly available for the next spin. This is 1978. There is no language yet for what Birnbaum is doing. No framework. No genre. She essentially invents video art as cultural criticism from scratch using a stolen television signal and a VHS deck. The spin keeps going. Which is either the most depressing loop in art history — or the most accurate one. Depending on whether anything has actually changed since 1978.