The Ballad of Technological Dependency

Repeats is a slide show film set to a soundtrack of answering-machine messages, accompanied by sequenced photographs that repeat and re-stage images from film history. Eleven narratives make up the work, each featuring the person who left the corresponding voice message. The work takes many of its cues from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the landmark experimental film composed almost entirely of still images — and one of several films ripped off here. Made in 2000, Repeats is itself a sequel — or repeat — of Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s earlier work The Ballad of Technological Dependency (1998), which was heavily indebted to the photography of Nan Goldin and William Yang, who appears in Repeats.

Australian artist Daniel Mudie Cunningham began Proud Mary in 2007 as a video performance series restaged every five years to document his ageing. To date, iterations have been produced in 2007, 2012, 2017 and 2022, with a fifth planned for 2027. Each iteration features Cunningham lip-syncing and dancing to Tina Turner’s version of “Proud Mary,” a song he has chosen for his own funeral. The work is held in the collection of the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Tasmania, where it is regularly exhibited.