You won't find these videos at Blockbuster

"Artists tend to install narrative elements in nonlinear ways," Sherman says, "showing a scene where something happens, depicted in multiple ways, as in a Godard art film." There's a strong interest, he adds, in engaging the viewer to construct the narrative.

Viola's "Going Forth By Day" involves five different video loops, projected simultaneously on four walls. Each portrays a different phase of human life: milestones from birth to the mortality of loved ones and promise of an afterlife. The viewer fuses the five scenarios into a coherent message.

In presentation, single or multiple projections on flat plasma screens are currently the dominant mode, although some artists still use monitors and some - like Tony Oursler - project videos on dolls or puppets. Increasingly, artists are sculpting space, creating video and acoustic installations like a virtual environment to immerse the viewer in the experience.

With high resolution and increased fidelity in color and luminosity, the video environments provide "almost a spiritual experience," Sherman says. "People get excited by the magic of display. Viola's projectors practically light the walls on fire."

What's brought the art form to the forefront is not the medium, however, but the content.

"The strength of the art is what's making it happen," Hanhardt said. "The reason it's recognized is because powerful ideas and innovative ways of making images are done through video."

Although the public has extensive experience viewing video on television and digital media on computer screens, some resist it in a high-art museum setting. Yood notes that audiences often complain if videos have audio components that bleed into other areas of the museum.

"The museum gallery," Sherman says, "was the last technology-free space," devoid of video displays and media. "Now it's just like the mall."

One potential problem to delay the expansion of video art is the lack of a viable economic model. Since the artwork exists only when the images are projected, it's not perceived as a commodity, and collectors have not flocked to acquire videocassettes or DVDs.

Nonetheless, no one believes video art is a passing fad.

"Artists respond to the world they're in," says Iles. "Unless computers and moving images cease to be important in our lives, it won't go away."

But can a high-tech format inspire in viewers the depth of emotion and revelation as a still image?

Art is art, according to Iles, who believes "the medium is not important as the quality of the experience. Video can provide the same level of excellence, joy, and wonder" as other art forms.

"Great works that draw from shared experience can have that impact," Hanhardt agrees.

"Simple facts of life become the way to find a bridge and shared vision with people from different cultures, races, history, and religion," the preeminent video artist Viola said in a Guggenheim press conference.

Since video speaks the media language of globalism, this "art can go out through the whole world and link us together as human beings."

As a time-based - rather than object-based - medium, video requires patience.

To grasp its message, Viola advised, "You need to spend your own time with the work. Some walk by; others stop and study it."

Don't peruse it like a painting. The meaning, he said, "comes in on a more unconscious level," as the images wash over you.

A willingness to interact and interpret helps. "It's important for the viewer to understand what's happening through duration," Sherman says. "When you find a pattern, then you can get into it on a conceptual level to derive the artist's influences and intent."

Seeing moving-image-based art with an open and engaged mind makes it just as compelling and - yes - just as moving as any still painting or sculpture. But you have to be still in order to be moved.

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