HOSTAGE, made by Dara Birnbaum in 1994, is a six channel video and laser installation. Five of the channels are press coverage of the events. Surrounding the 1977 Red Army Faction kidnapping of German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, and the resultant "suicides" of three jailed BaaderMeinhof members. Each monitor is paired with a "target shield". The sixth channel focuses on the response of the mass media in the United States to these events. The flow of images on this channel can be affected by the viewer's interaction with a targeted laser beam, which when interrupted, freezes the image on the screen. Birnbaum considers the influence of mass media communications as a potential form of terrorism, with society and media each being held hostage by the other. For Birnbaum, Baudrillard's Fatal Strategies holds true--the hostage is beyond the state of alienation and in a state of radical emergency and virtual extermination.