This article discusses Dara Birnbaum's multi-channel sound and video installation, PM Magazine, which used advanced electronic image-processing techniques to produce a phantasmagoria of the media. Unlike other artists working with computer and video technologies, Birnbaum's work addresses a fundamental structural contradiction in technocratic society. The irresistible rise of the irrational in a civilization based upon the practical application of rational, scientific thought. As a postmodern artist, Birnbaum's PM Magazine is exemplary, for it is a simulacrum of the media that engages television critically, and on its own terms, in order to expose it as the phantasmagoria of the late 20th century.