f you're walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge tonight and all of a sudden you see on your chest a surgical scar, a gunshot wound, or maybe just a scrape -- fear not. You're not the victim of violence, illness, or accident. You've unwittingly stepped into the middle of a public art piece.
The third Boston Cyberarts Festival kicks off with a conference, ''Digital Art and Public Space: Expanding Definitions of Public Art,'' and a host of events on street corners, in train stations, and in storefronts. Boston is known as a hotbed of computer-generated art, thanks to the area's concentration of high-tech industries and universities. But this will be the first time that public art pieces -- those the public can encounter in the course of a regular workday -- will take center stage at the Cyberarts Festival.
These projects range from bizarre to playful to poignant. Berkan Karpat's ''On a Ship to Mars'' at the Goethe Institute allows volunteers to sleep in a pod and have their dream states orchestrated -- literally set to the rhythms of a Turkish poem by Nazim Hikmet. The Surveillance Camera Players seek out the aforementioned contraptions and act out plays in front of them to protest what the troupe sees as a violation of the right to privacy. Meanwhile, in Bruce Hanson's ''Wounds,'' which he'll be performing in Cambridge tonight and throughout the weekend, the artist will aim digital video projections of gaping, bloody wounds at unsuspecting passersby.
''Some people see the light of the projector and think they're in the way,'' says Hanson, a Seattle-based artist. ''Others will explore what's happening here. The intent is to draw some people into exploring it more deeply, to ask, `How does this relate to me?' ''
Public art poses problems and possibilities that art within a museum does not. A street-corner audience doesn't self-select the way museumgoers do. That's one of the reasons most public art is subject to months or years of debate before it is installed.
The dawn of electronic public art came in the early 1980s, when conceptual artist Jenny Holzer started broadcasting aphoristic text messages on an early version of the Times Square billboard. Computer-generated art in the public sphere raises the same questions a proposed statue in a park does, and more.
''What happens when technology comes into traditional public space?'' asks Ricardo Barreto, director of Urban Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art, an agency that oversees many public art projects in Boston. ''Is cyberspace public? Is our definition of public space changing? Nobody has had this kind of structured discussion of these issues. We're going to do that.''
If some of the projects coming to Boston throughout the two-week festival are any indication, cyberart on city streets has the potential to infiltrate the public's experience more deeply than that statue in the park.
''Infiltrate is a good word,'' says George Fifield, the Cyberart Festival's director. ''It's harmless, it's eye-opening, but it has a stealth way about it.''
But public digital art is also stealthlike in the way it engages, provokes, and interacts with often unsuspecting viewers. In the same way the Internet has made publishing more wide-ranging and democratic, these projects make art more accessible and turn the viewers into artists themselves.
Natasha Makowski and Kurt Kevill, of Boston-based ISPACE Design Collaborative, plan to stream words of wisdom they've been collecting over the past month on the LED display -- a low-voltage, electronic scrolling light display -- at South Station. The duo put the word out on the Internet that they would be broadcasting text and asked users to contribute their ideas of wisdom. So ISPACE provides the format, but Internet users provide the content.
''The LED has been part of the architecture for over a decade, and it has only said `Welcome to South Station,' '' Makowski says. ''We made a deal. We would update their system, and they'd let us broadcast for two weeks.''
Makowski says the project, ''Words on the Site: Illuminated Words'' pays homage to MIT theoretician David Weinberger. ''He says it's not really the technology, it's the opportunity for connection itself that will get us connected,'' Makowski says.
Technology often provides that opportunity. ''Tap,'' designed by San Francisco artist James Buckhouse and choreographer Holly Brubach, explicitly invites viewers to connect, challenge, and play with one another. Beaming stations will send ''Tap'' to passersby who carry PDAs, such as a PalmPilot. The program offers line drawings of a man or a woman learning to tap dance. The characters must practice to get good. As the dancer learns, the user can choreograph dances, and then beam those dances to other viewers also playing ''Tap'' on their PDAs.
''There's this moment when they beam it to someone else, when they're face to face with someone, creating this relationship,'' Buckhouse says.
Sometimes, however, the technology can get in the way of experiencing the art.
'' `Tap' is difficult to figure out,'' says Brian Wallace, director of exhibitions at the Galleries of Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and curator of the public art component of the Cyberarts Festival. ''The artwork pushes the viewers to use their own devices in new ways. I've shown interactive art for 10 or 12 years, and I remember the first time people had to use a mouse. It's not easy at first.''
At the same time, technology can make the art more accessible.
Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar's ''Pedestrian'' projects onto the ground a street scene, complete with trees, potholes, and people walking and talking on cellphones. It has had installations in New York, Belgium, Korea, and Germany, provoking a variety of reactions.
''On a sidewalk outside the Studio Museum in Harlem, people would come by and provide their own stories, or make up rap songs,'' says Kaiser on the phone from New York. ''Children walk right into it. They play hopscotch on it. In Belgium, kids came up and played basketball on top of it. They bounced the ball on top of the people they were following.''
Up now through May 11, the Boston-area incarnation of ''Pedestrian'' isn't projected on the sidewalk but inside an empty storefront at 350 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge.
''With this kind of piece, you can reach out to anyone,'' Kaiser says, ''whether they're drawn in by the form, or the technical aspects, or they see it as a piece of filmmaking, or they see it as a game,'' he says.
All the public art pieces at the Cyberarts Festival intend to break down walls that have kept people from experiencing art.
''Until recently, interactive art happened in the museum and the gallery,'' says Barreto. ''That's a 20th-century idea. Maybe [public digital art] is where the 21st century will lead us. It sure opens things up in interesting ways.''
The Boston Cyberarts Festival runs in more than 50 locations April 26 - May 11. An opening gala takes place tonight at the Hotel@MIT from 6:30-9.For more information, visit www.bostoncyberarts.org or call 617-524-8495.
