Ohio-based artist Peter D'Agostino's video works examine the structures of communication as they organize and inform everyday life. Teletapes is a multi-layered, visual essay about the invasion of television's overbearing sign system. Divided into three sections, "TeleTricks," "TeleGames" and "TelePuzzles," the videotape uses appropriated footage, games, text, interviews with children, and special effects to create a meta-context that emulates television while criticizing it. In QUARKS, D'Agostino defamiliarizes television codes by colliding snippets of TV audio with unnerving settings. The spectator's passive role is undermined as evasive juxtapositions of image and sound call for constant re-evaluation. The acquisition of language is the subject of DOUBLE YOU (and X,Y,Z.); here the early stages of development are linked with the forces that govern physical action. Drawing analogies between physical forces-light, gravity, weak and strong forces-and the underlying structures of language, D'Agostino's videotape declares a universal pattern, perhaps the irreducible model of nature. In the Beginning Was the 'S'... is an overture to a metaphorical history of the electronic age. Terse, beautifully crafted images telegraph the early contributions of Edison, Tesla and Marconi. The "S" (three dots in Morse Code) of the title refers to Marconi's first trans-Atlantic test of wireless telegraphy, the beginning of the age of electronic transmission. Steve Seid