Ulrike Rosenbach’s  To Have No Power Is To Have Power  was a performance dealing with feminist ideas, specifically about female representation in art history. The pose and framing are reminiscent of traditional paintings and representations of females in art. The photos taken are beautiful and could be mistaken for an older work at first glance because of their composition. However, the woman depicted here is unwillingly trapped in a net, delivering a bold message to viewers.
As a performance piece, she would have been bringing a framing reminiscent to old paintings to life and elevating herself above the viewer while still be trapped and powerless. This would ideally force viewers to think about how this translates to women in as a whole in the arts and to take a critical look back on art history and women’s role in it.
While not really visible in the photos we have now, the work also made use of new technology. It included screens that displayed images from art history as a backdrop for her performance. This addition would have made the message far more apparent.
Another performance piece, Chris Burden’s  Through the Night Softly  also uses the artist’s body to create a compelling work of art, but in this case, in a far more disconcerting way. The artist’s hands are bound behind his back, so he’s forced to put his full body weight on the glass to wiggle across it . The video was played in commercial slots to viewers in their homes.
While clearer, more shocking depictions of a character maneuvering through broken glass have perhaps desensitized us to the videos or photos of this performance regardless of how real and visceral he intended it to be, it must have been a real shock for people at the time, and would have certainly been so for anyone present. Having it invade your television without warning or want in place of a commercial would have been similarly shocking and was an innovative way to display and contextualize the performance video.
The desensitization that people seeing this now may have already undergone was perhaps the very thing that this work, and more of Burden’s work, was attempting to call attention to.
Rather than just a video documentation of a performance artwork, in Mariko Mori’s  Miko no Inori,  video is the format of the work. The video is a gorgeous, iridescent fantasy clip with sci-fi elements and a haunting musical background. A woman in pearlescent, futuristic garb delicately handles an beautiful orb. The title, meaning “shrine maiden’s prayer,” seems very traditional to contrast with the futuristic-seeming content of the video.
Rather than talk directly about current events or make her viewers squirm like some other artists of this time period, Mori’s work here instead creates a futuristic fantasy that the viewer can escape to, which is pretty refreshing within the context of new media as a whole, which is either criticizing the viewer, making fun of them, or offending them more oft than not.
