10.16.2024
Gretchen Bender’s Dumping Core
Gretchen Bender wrote,
“I believe that an acceleration into, rather than a resistance to, our multilayered visual environment will reveal structures or open windows to the development of a critical consciousness we can’t yet perceive as useful from within our immediate vantage point.”
Dumping Core is an installation artwork created by Gretchen Bender in 1984. It comprises 13 televisions, all which start in sync playing snippets of TV commercials, animated graphics, war footage, and so on, that progressively get out of sync. Accompanying the footage is a loud synth soundtrack that is discordant from the TV programming. In front of the televisions is a bench for viewers to sit on, in a manner suggesting a stage play. I saw the piece several times at the MoMA, my first time in 2017, a year after its installation. It was a piece I revisited often.
I consider her piece to be a foreshadowing of the state of affairs that followed in terms of media consumption—it’s interactive in a similar way that scrolling through Twitter or TikTok is interactive. Viewers are directed to “interact” with the piece in a specific manner, sitting in front of the TVs on a bench, with no real instruction regarding the contents of the piece or how to follow along. Dumping Core is a piece that, despite my interacting with it more than 30 years after its inception, felt like one of the most compelling works of art in the post-modern era—it preempted the manner in which the Gen Z mind consumes media. The extreme leaps Bender takes with this work—her rapid-fire editing, the disconnected audio/visual experience, and the literal inability to focus on all TVs as one unit—all feel so innate within our modern media landscape.
It seems that all of my interactions with technology have been inching towards this overstimulating mode of consumption. Bender’s work also unsettles with its disjointed nature, highlighting key cultural commentary about media consumption, TV news, consumerism and commercialism, and other salient postmodern themes quite present in the 80s. As I write this, my roommate is browsing through TikTok in the room near mine while I listen to Paul Simon’s Darling Lorraine on Apple Music. There’s media overload all around me. Dumping Core is the essence of our current relationship with media and how we interact with it. So, while the piece itself is not explicitly interactive in a manner where a user provides input, it almost predicts our relationship with interactive media today.
Consider the media landscape of the time—the 80s were a time of rapid development in consumer technology. CNN started in 1980 as the first 24-hour news network on cable. These channels slowly began to amass a larger audience share, capitalizing on sensational news reporting as exemplified by the O.J. Simpson trial coverage on CNN. Reactionist works like Videodrome by David Cronenberg highlight the average American’s endless desire to consume, using violence and depraved acts to demonstrate this in the film. The era can also be aptly called the peak of postmodernism, with theorists like Baudrillard and Bourdieu commenting on the nature of reality/hyperreality and culture shaped by materialism. Baudrillard in particular makes an astute argument about the media landscape in his work Simulacra and Simulation, wherein he notes our descent into hyperreality is directly linked to media like television demolishing any semiotic reference to the real world.
This period can also be viewed through Marshall McLuhan’s lens in The Gutenberg Galaxy. McLuhan explores the very ways in which media influence social consciousness—just as the invention of the Gutenberg press revolutionized the very fabric of society, television and media in the 80s began to erode any sense of reality as seen in prior generations. If 80s media is hyperreal, we enter Baudrillard’s simulation. Culture in this age is developed through reference to media. The more we consume, the more our reality warps.
As I reflect back upon Bender’s work, it’s impossible to ignore her overt commentary on this postmodern sentiment. The world that Bender creates with this installation is intended to mimic the era. The viewer sits in a dark room and has the choice of any given TV to direct their attention to. If the viewer tires of one program, they can simply turn their head and look towards another program displaying far more colorful and interesting graphics. It is true that the viewer has the aforementioned choice to divert their gaze wherever in the exhibit, but the viewer is limited to seeing only the television screens. The darkness that enshrouds the exhibit alienates the viewer from the outside world, while the music is set at a volume that is just a little too loud to further isolate the viewer. Bender makes it impossible for a viewer to engage with the real world in this exhibit, instead she boldly demands their attention for 18 minutes. As an “interactive” piece, Dumping Core transports the viewer to another reality and encourages them to break from the context of the museum, where they may consider each piece thoughtfully and independently. She assails the viewer with enough to render the contemplative viewing pattern useless, and preys upon the viewer’s modern and innate urge to passively consume a myriad stimuli at once.
However, what Bender may not have predicted or envisioned at the time is the prevalence of smartphones in the present day. Ironically, one can sit at the bench and completely ignore Bender’s work simply by pulling out an iPhone. Her attempt to capture attention has been bested by modern media practice that extends beyond the 24 hours news cycle. The smartphone introduces the 24 hour everything cycle, be that shopping, socializing, gaming, and so on. The only disruption to Bender’s attempt at constructing an alternate media reality is another screen that contains another alternate media reality. The cycle continues, and brutally so.
A viewer can consume media on the internet with the same rapid-fire impulse as seen in Dumping Core. One moment, a viewer might pause to laugh at a meme, after, they may pause to look at a gorey photo of some recent happening. I noted earlier that Bender’s piece was isolating from reality—it is very dark and very loud. Social media today feels similar. The dopamine rush encourages a user to come back to the platform and seclude themselves from reality. The content is overstimulating and oversaturated—every other TikTok now links to an item in the TikTok Shop. The same trends in the 80s—hyper consumerist tendencies, the attention economy, and so on—are found on the internet today and are more extreme than ever. What feels even more present in today’s information age is that human interaction with these devices has only increased, and has made it even more difficult to break from the device into reality. The user, through real and tangible movements, manipulates the virtual, and bridges the gap between the two.
Yet, no room can be perfectly dark. The MoMA cannot control for light leak and ensure that the exit remains visible and accessible. Therefore, when seated in the exhibit, and likely unintentional to Bender, one might spot the yellow haze of a light from the outside exhibits creeping into the installation room. There exists a small beacon of optimism, almost as if Dumping Core is attempting to gently remind the viewer that there is, in fact, an exit, and that one can leave whenever they so please and reënter the real world. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that despite living in the age of information, one doesn’t need to have an ideological alignment of being pro/anti technology. Instead, one can recognize the ability to exist in this in-between of reality and hyperreality, acknowledging both and engaging with both.
This leads to perhaps the most fundamental difference between Dumping Core and our contemporary technological lives. The installation inherently recognizes that there is ultimately a return to the real world—the programming is finite, ending after a set duration and repeating, and it exists in the context of other works that don’t necessarily evoke the same experience in a viewer. There is always an ultimate end to Bender’s work. When we consider smartphones and today’s internet landscape, our relationship with media seems to blur. There isn’t a real escape from the technological hyperreality. Our phones exist as extensions of ourselves—Donna Haraway astutely describes in her work A Cyborg Manifesto that living beings and technology ultimately merge to form a human nature and culture that relies on technology, and is inseparable from it. Cell phones are extensions of the self—human social interaction and other innate natural instincts are now literally impossible to execute in today’s social context without a phone. There’s a sort of social ostracization that might occur if you were to walk up to someone and befriend them, then promptly whip out a flip phone to store their contact information instead of an iPhone. Such behavior is social deviance.
To be honest, Bender’s piece feels like a warning sign from the 80s, despite her claim that an “acceleration” can “reveal structures or open windows to the development of a critical consciousness we can’t yet perceive.” Maybe it is the case that we can’t quite perceive the consciousness since we’re currently living in it. Yet, her piece now appears to embody that period and gives viewers a retroactive sense of what that critical consciousness may have been like in the 80s. Today, however, Dumping Core is exaggerated, brash, and at times impossibly incoherent. The television as a symbol of media overstimulation is classic, but dated. They’re not as mobile as cell phones, far less interactive than computers, and relatively uninteractive. What is particularly distressing, however, is that despite the knowledge of the horrid and negative impacts of technology proliferating across the postmodern era, we have continued to develop these technologies. They are even more invasive and integrated than ever before. It is as if, collectively, we decided that we would stay on Bender’s bench and watch the programming in hopes of reaching some critical consciousness, and chose to ignore the light beam that promised a world of relative tangibility and natural instinct free of false realities.