Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang, 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 a shootout from the crime drama Kojak with an advertisement by the computer company Wang. In Birnbaum’s narrative, the bullets in the Kojak scene bounce around infinitely and transform into the laser beams used in the Wang commercial.