Works by George Snow, Shelly Silver and Ken Kobland The first stories were probably told with flailing arms, or a stick dragged through the sand-visceral, improvised. With time, expectations settled in, dictating form, voice and texture. The works in tonight's program attempt not so much to shatter those expectations as to circumvent them, broadening the possibilities for their fictive accounts. George Snow's adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's The Assignation (1988, 12 mins) condenses the story while expanding the spatial aspects. The vampiric characters perform in a gaudy "Venice" assembled in video space. Keyed backdrops and multi-layered imagery allow this tale of watery death and intellectual seclusion to wander freely through the ether of electronic imaginings. thirtysomething deconstructed would almost, but not quite, describe Shelly Silver's The Houses That Are Left (1990, 29 mins). Shards of highly comic yuppie life jut up against documentary glimpses of Manhattan, while a chorus of the dead yammers from on high. Within this blurring of realities, graphical text and music conspire to unnerve the viewer. In Ken Kobland's Foto Roman: A Radio/Video Play (1990, 28 mins), a man, only heard in voice-over, flees from some unnamed scandal. Posing as a mystery with Vito Acconci as the protagonist, Kobland's seductive work empties out genre-romance and travelog, as well as mystery-while fostering the substance of uncertainty. To construct the interior space of its antihero, Foto Roman subsumes random images of the exterior world, filling them with foreign meaning. Here, perception itself becomes the mysterious traveler. --Steve Seid