Pop-Pop Video: General Hospital/Olympic Speed Skating, 1980

As televisions became increasingly common in American living rooms in the 1970s, Birnbaum was among the earliest artists to use television content as source material. Altering, glitching, cutting, and splicing it without seeking legal permission, she claimed she was manipulating “a medium which is itself highly manipulative.”

Birnbaum’s Pop-Pop Video series splices together scenes from seemingly unrelated television programs, exposing television’s homogenous visual vocabulary. This work pairs scenes from the soap opera General Hospital and the Olympic sport of speed skating, exposing the parallels between the soap opera’s reverse-angle shot and the sport’s crossover technique.