PROVINCETOWN FILM FESTIVAL: Gus Van Sant is the guest of honor and recipient of the "Filmmaker on the Edge" Award at the fourth annual Provincetown Film Festival, which takes over the tip of the Cape June 13 through 16. Academy Award–winning actress Marcia Gay Harden (whose Gaud’ Afternoon will be screened at the fest) will be on hand to accept the Excellence in Acting Award; and director Mira Nair will show up to receive the first annual Faith Hubley Award and to introduce the opening-night film, her Hysterical Blindness (2001). Van Sant, Harden, and Nair join Sebastian Junger and P-Town summer resident John Waters for a "Conversation with the Stars" on June 15. Other highlights include screenings of By Hook or by Crook (2001), which is directed by and stars queer-punk scenester Silas Howard of the group Tribe 8; the cinematic return of B-movie host Cassandra Peterson, a/k/a Elvira, in the Vincent Price spoof Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001); the They Might Be Giants documentary Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns); stand-up comedienne Margaret Cho’s latest monologue, Notorious C.H.O.; and Finn Taylor’s Cherish, in which Robin Tunney gets jolted out of her slow-lane AM-pop-obsessed life by a carjacker (Tim Blake Nelson). Liz Phair, Jason Priestley, and Nora Dunn also star. For a complete festival rundown, visit www.ptownfilmfest.com or call (508) 487-FILM.

BLACK HISTORY GALA: Next Friday, June 7, Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated actress Cicely Tyson hosts the Museum of Afro-American History’s Jubilation 2002, the gala event at which the museum gives out a number of African-American History Awards. This third annual celebration features theater, dance, and music performances beginning at 7 p.m. at the Boston Marriott Copley Place Hotel, 110 Huntington Avenue. Tickets are $150, with proceeds to benefit the museum. A related exhibit, "A Legacy of Literature," includes a selection of books and letters from the museum’s collection; it’s on view through August 30. The Museum of Afro-American History is at 46 Joy Street on Beacon Hill. Call (617) 725-0022.

NEXT WEEKEND:

Web racket

Little Red Riding Hood is lovesick. You can tell by the wistful Robert Smith lyrics scratched in her diary — if, that is, you know where in Donna Leishman’s Red Riding Hood to seek out Red’s secretive sketchbook. (It’s in her basket.) A Web-based retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ classic, Leishman’s comic-book-style rendering is among the on-line works featured in "Web Racket: Contemporary Interactive Web Art," an exhibit that will open next weekend at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln. In Leishman’s version, Red is recast as an aching adolescent who’s fallen for the dangerously dreamy Wolf — a scooter-hopping teenage stud with baggy pants, emerald eyes, and a bushy brow. Like his forefather, this Wolf lures the gullible girl to bed: nine months later, Red’s the one with the full stomach.

Red’s doleful diary is one of the primary reasons George Fifield, curator of new media at the DeCordova Museum and founder of the biennial CyberArts festival, chose Leishman’s animated piece for "Web Racket" — it is, he says, an example of new-media interactivity applied to traditional character development. Fifield calls interactivity "one of the most revolutionary artistic advances in our time." And though the term sounds just hollow and techie enough to seem out of place in a discussion of pure ¾sthetics, he uses it not to refer to any particular technology but to describe the potential for innumerable experiences with a single artwork. "It’s kind of like William Burroughs said, where you can tear all the pages out of a book, throw them all up in the air, pick them up at random, and read them. Potentially, every person’s path through the work is a little different."

The objective of "Web Racket" is to explore the possibilities of interactive art, and each of the five pieces Fifield has selected broaches the subject in a slightly different manner. Michael Mittelman’s The New War is a thinly veiled socio-political commentary in the structure of a video game: players sit in an armchair, fire lasers at targets around the room, and can’t lose or die. Megan Hurst & Michael Mittelman’s Memory Mapping begs its audience to collaborate: participants draw images from memory, and those squiggly pictures then become additions to its composition. Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter jumbles up the idea of a hypertext narrative by turning screens of sentences into non-linear word banks. And Dane’s (just the one name for this artist) cinematic Help attacks its own medium by dubbing robotic voices over flashing grids in an attempt to underscore the impersonal nature of modern society.

The exhibit also raises questions about what constitutes art in the Internet age. Only The New War and Memory Mapping will involve any sort of traditional installation — the other three pieces will be presented at computer workstations. "The idea is that you can walk out of here and go to the DeCordova Web site from home and have a similar experience at home on the Web site," Fifield admits. So then why does a museum bother to exhibit Web art? "The same reason that a museum shows any type of art: we’re providing a critical filter."

Re-emphasizing the symbiotic nature of interactive art, Fifield adds, "This art doesn’t exist until an audience is engaged with it." So if the audience is entirely complicit, is interactive art more altruistic than traditional art forms? "Actually, interactive art is more like playing God. Whereas a novelist is removing free will from those who travel through it, an interactive artist is imbuing viewers with free will to explore the world he or she has built. So maybe interactive art is actually more egotistic than altruistic."

Does Fifield see video games, the pop-culture epitome of interactivity, as art? "There’s a good case to be made that they’re a type of folk art. Not that they’re high art, but they are definitely a literary and visceral experience not unlike, say, a Russ Meyer film. And are Russ Meyer movies art?"

"Web Racket: Contemporary Interactive Web Art" runs June 8 through September 1 at the DeCordova Museum, 51 Sandy Pond Road in Lincoln. Call (781) 259-8355 or visit www.decordova.org for more info.

BY CAMILLE DODERO