The Ballad of Technological Dependency links narratives of fact and fiction, threading together memory, friendship and community. Created by Australian artist Daniel Mudie Cunningham, the work combines answering-machine messages with photographs of thirteen friends, drawing on events and recollections from the previous year. The work emerged from Cunningham’s interest in American photographer Nan Goldin and Australian photographer William Yang, whose practices document the communities and subcultures to which they belong. Rather than attempting to tell the truth through photography, Cunningham became increasingly interested in blurring fact and fiction, using real people, messages and memories to invent parts of the story. In 2000, Cunningham made a sequel, Repeats.

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.