Gretchen Bender. Dumping Core. 1984. / Media from Television to the In.

Gretchen Bender. Dumping Core. 1984. Electronic theater (four-channel video [color, sound; 13 min.] and thirteen monitors). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Modern Women’s Fund. © 2019 Gretchen Bender. Courtesy the Estate of Gretchen Bender

Gretchen Bender worked in the commercial sphere on music videos, advertisements, and television shows while simultaneously making art that critiqued the media culture within which she operated. Her work experience made her skeptical of the latest mass communication technologies, including television, which she saw as the next frontier for visual expression and psychological oppression: “I think of the media as a cannibalistic river,” she said three years after completing Dumping Core. “There is no consciousness or mind. It’s about absorbing and converting.”

Bender conceived Dumping Core as a theatrical presentation complete with live electronic music. It lives on as a gallery installation in which she programmed four videos to play in varying combinations across 13 synchronized monitors. “I’ll mimic the media.but I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there,” she has explained. The screens pulse with an overload of repeating television graphics, corporate logos, and clips appropriated from advertisements, TV programs, and movies. Bender titled the work after an early computing term, “core dump,” which is a recording of a computer’s memory captured just before it crashes.

Gretchen Bender. Dumping Core (1984)