No Brush Required

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Maybe it's no surprise that one of the most bewitching works in either show is a lyrical triumph of mid-tech. For The Telephone Call, at SFMOMA, Janet Cardiff combines two of the most common consumer-electronic devices: headphones and a palm-size digital videocam. Leave a credit card and a photo ID at the visitor's desk, and the museum equips you with both devices.

On its foldout viewscreen, the camera displays the visuals for Cardiff's 17-minute "video walk." With the headphones, she directs viewers through galleries, into empty back stairways and even across the museum catwalk. In real space you move along empty passages that on your screen are full of people. Or you move down crowded passages that are empty on your screen. All the while, Cardiff reminisces and riffs as bursts of music rise and fall. In no time, her fantasies are inseparable from your own internal noise. The borders of your consciousness are slyly overrun. More fun than a funhouse excursion, as intimate as Molly's soliloquy in Ulysses, it's a work that places all your synapses on a new kind of high alert. Is this the future of digital art? Then let a thousand digits bloom.