Yet another updating of an old concern for art -- distribution -- is the subject of "Selected Works From Aspect ," an exhibition at Axiom Gallery . The show presents four pieces that have been featured in Aspect, a biannual DVD periodical -- a format that enables readers to experience video and sound works as they are intended to be seen and heard. The show is worth a trip for works by Jim Campbell , Tony Cokes , Jill Magid , and Christopher Miner , whose video meditation on lust, sin, and his own body is rivetingly creepy. But in the context of the Cyberarts Festival, it's the questions implicitly raised about how and where art will be seen in the future that are most pertinent. Will the old- fashioned gallery be superseded by new forms of communication and distribution?
Back to the future
New technologies meet old ideals at the Boston Cyberarts Festival
Speaking of which, art on the Web is curiously absent from the festival. There's one interesting exception, however. In a show called "Encounters" at Mills Gallery in the Boston Center for the Arts, computers display a Web portal designed by Dutch artist Stani Michiels . Access any website through Michiels's "Copacabana Cybercafé " and you discover that certain words have been replaced by their opposites or by foreign words. On the Cyber- arts Festival's site I found the words "join us" had been replaced by the words "boycott us." With such pranksterism, Michiels means to subvert our faith in a communication medium on which we have become highly dependent.
One of the most unexpected of the festival's exhibitions is "Picture Show" at the Photographic Resource Center . Here curator Leslie K. Brown has gathered together not futuristic technology, but works by contemporary artists that imitate old- fashioned moving-picture devices. Mechanized sculptures by Steve
As for the festival as a whole, I think that what it needs more than anything at this point is a home. Festival director George Fifield has done a heck of a job, but with exhibitions and events scattered all over the city, few people will get to experience even a fraction of it. And those who try to take it all in will be frustrated by having to spend so much time traveling between exhibitions, some of which, on their own, either are not very strong or don't take that much time to grasp. If it could all be gathered into one big exhibition hall, it would do a lot more to raise consciousness and generate conversation about developments in art and technology that are changing our world as we speak.
Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.