Evocation is the prologue of the three-part series Damnation of Faust, in which Birnbaum transforms the Faustian myth into a dreamlike introspection on the duality of the internalized self and the external world. A playground scene, shot in the streets of lower Manhattan, is the work's literal evocation. An underlying tension is derived from a longing for innocence and renewal, a desire to transcend everyday experience, which is evoked through the awakening of a young woman's lost childhood. Birnbaum brings her architectural background to the piece, using 19th-century Japanese ukiyo-e forms, fans and vertical pillars as visual motifs that plunge the viewer into the picture frame; scenes unfold and glimpses of meaning are revealed like a fan being opened. As much as the fan reveals, it also conceals — a key to the tape's very duality. Birnbaum uses video technology as an expressive pictorial language; multiple frames and images articulate the conjoinment of inner psychological space and external space, past and present, memory and reality. The three-part original score — dub music, haunting incantations and jubilant synth-pop — mirrors the protagonist's trajectory from confinement to transcendence.