Kojak/Wang (1980) by Dara Birnbaum (1946, New York) is part of the artist’s Pop-Pop Video series, which appropriates television footage. The artist explains: ‘I had been reading a good deal about film semiotics, but it seemed like no one was analysing television, which to me was the dominant cultural vocabulary in America in the late 1970s… Kojak/Wang was an attempt to see if I could appropriate the stereotypical male voice. The ad from Wang Industries, which was the largest, most dominant seller of computers at the time showed a woman at a computer with laser beams shooting in and out of it. I thought this was an unusual depiction: like the traditional role of a secretary, but now at a computer. And I juxtaposed that with scenes from Kojak, a typical violent, shoot-’em-up crime drama. There are two men appearing in it, Kojak as a very strong character, and the man he’s questioning as a rather weak figure – and this very commercialised, stereotypical new role for women.’