In the 1980s Gretchen Bender (b. 1951, Seaford, Delaware – d. 2004, New York City, New York) was linked to the Pictures Generation artists for her video works and installations that appropriate elements from television, films and corporate aesthetics. Her work has been described as using ‘media against itself – to have it entertaining and critical simultaneously’. In 1984, through the artist Amber Denker, she gained access to the equipment of the Computer Graphics Lab at the New York Institute of Technology where she started to incorporate computer-generated images into her work.
The 13-monitor, four-channel video installation Dumping Core (1984) is titled after a computer error when a computer programme crashes or terminates uncharacteristically and ‘dumps’ its record of the working memory (the ‘core’). It also alludes to a partial nuclear meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania in 1979 where part of the reactor core melted and the system became dangerously radioactive. Conceived as an ‘electronic theater’, the installation mimics and exaggerates the pervasive media culture of American television networks in the 1980s. Bender later described how ‘from that equivalent flow [she] tried to force some kind of consciousness of underlying patterns of social control.’
Another work by Gretchen Bender is shown on the first floor, read here about Wild Dead.