October 2, 2002

IT'S A LITTLE odd to stand around staring at a suitcase or a purse, waiting for it to do something. The "actors" in New Langton's Bags show are a little temperamental, though, and you just can't rush them into anything. Tubes and wires run all around the gallery floor, leading from each bag to a hidden source of pneumatic or electric power that causes irregular fits of opening and closing and flashing lights. Some of the bags are cutely clichéd – an alligator purse that snaps its hinged "jaw," or a "handicapped" golf bag that walks with a limp – but others take on an unexpectedly graceful and poetic new life once they've been equipped with the means to move around, such as the Navy duffel bag that rises and falls like a sighing sea anemone. The two primary artists behind the exhibit are Nick Bertoni, an artist-activist and founding director of the Tinker's Workshop in Berkeley (where the bags' technical components were constructed), and Laetitia Sonami, a noted performer, composer, and installation artist. Sonami stitched together the nearly maddening cacophony of voices and music that serves as the show's soundtrack. Concurrently running on New Langton's Web site (www.newlangtonarts.org) is a second exhibit, Day Jobs. It explores the ways in which the graphic and digital design work of four professional Internet artists (Maya Kalogera, Valery Grancher, Mark Tribe, and Jody Zellen) influences their personal Net-art projects and vice versa. As with the bags, patience is required; not all the Web sites were designed to be user-friendly, and some, like Zellen's GhostCity.com, take unconventional navigation and graphic complexity to an extreme. As long as you aren't in a hurry, though, it's definitely an engaging several-hours' worth of reading and clicking around.