The Cyber Scene in Dallas ~ By Eric Olsson

The 12th Annual Dallas Video Festival (http://www.videofest.org, "Better Living Through Video") ran March 25-28 at the Dallas Theater Center and featured four theaters' worth of local, national, and international video productions. This year's festival was sponsored in part by local Internet star Broadcast.com. The full program is available at the website, but highlights included presentation of the 1999 Ernie Kovacs Award to Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-Wee Herman. This should go well in the Playhouse next to his "Solo Artist of the Year" trophy from a few years back :-) WFAA-TV of Dallas, "The Nation's First HDTV Station", filled the lobby with High-Definition TVs. As they showed nothing but nature films and parades I was left to wonder whether we'd really won the Cold War after all. Oh well, the picture quality rocks. The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, a local art gallery (http://www.themac.net), featured a concurrent video art exhibit, "Wired for Living". The exhibit stretched "new media" to its limits, with works such as Matthew McCaslin's "Pride of Place" (Video monitors, wheelbarrow, clocks and wiring) and Johnny Walker's Mnemoniscope (Installation including 8mm-film projector, six humidifiers and a chair).