This year’s edition of DiVA could not feel less like an art fair, especially in comparison to the stylish, well-appointed trade shows uptown at the piers. The five-year-old digital and video art event, which has its roots in the hotel-fair approach, added a semi-outdoor component last year, with some galleries setting up inside shipping containers on the streets of Chelsea—despite the neighborhood’s history of turning into a ghost town during fair week. This year DiVA has dropped the hotel altogether, tacked the subtitle “The Streets” onto its name, shortened its roster of galleries from 26 to just 9 (after several dropped out), and confined itself to a constellation of 20-to-33-foot-long shipping containers dispersed throughout Chelsea and a hub and event space at White Box. In other words, it is now a world away from the champagne and soft carpeting of The Armory Show.

Beating the other Armory-week fairs out of the gate, DiVA, which is run by the nonprofit Frère Independent, held a soft opening and V.I.P. reception on March 22 in advance of its official run from the 25th to the 30th. Several participating galleries were still setting up as the event began, grappling with how best to present—and sell—work in ad hoc spaces prey to the noise of Westside traffic. Some dealers embraced the format head-on, showing installations that either complemented or contrasted with the street-side location, while others did their best to re-create a typical fair booth. All seemed excited about the prospect of inserting themselves into the flow of Manhattan street life, though few reported sales at the opening.

Located at the entrance to a parking garage underneath the High Line on 23rd Street, Westchester County’s Kenise Barnes Fine Art has the most fully realized installation of the nine: a suburban secret garden created by painter and video artist Lisa Dahl. An Astroturf floor splashed with aromatic grass oil and bounded by fresh flowers and a miniature white picket fence set the backdrop for On the Homefront (2006), a video in an edition of 10 and priced at $950 to $1,400, which filled the space with the shouting and machine gun fire of American troops engaged in a firefight in Iraq. Small paintings of suburban houses blotted out by glow-in-the-dark pigment line the container ($850 each), while near the entrance, another video work dealing with the suburbs, Lawn (2007), loops on an iMac (edition of 5 beginning at $850).

Last year Barnes participated at Red Dot, a fair held in the Park South Hotel, but she says that she prefers the container, even if it does require collectors to do a bit more legwork. “It’s a bizarre way to show,” says Dahl of the shipping container. “But hotel fairs are just so claustrophobic. Here we can open our doors and see the world go by. Even people parking their cars in the lot stop in and ask what’s happening in here.”

Another first-time DiVA participant, Gallery Vartai from Vilnius, Lithuania, also went with a single artist. Lithuanian artist Ray Bartkus has turned the booth on 25th street into a roughshod workshop that recalls the neighborhood’s remaining garage spaces, filling it with several lightbox lambda prints (priced at $7,000 each) that resemble street-side advertisements. Created over the last few years in conjunction with the artist’s Web project www.thisisreallybadnews.com, they depict fabricated scenes from cable news broadcasts and Web searches that parody media-generated paranoia. One shows the legs of a news anchor dangling above a desk as if the talking head had been hanged from a boom mike just out of frame. Another shows two anchors pointing guns at each other while one calls out such violent wire service headlines as “American Hostage Beheaded” and “Maoists Kill Four in Nepal” with selected letters highlighted in red to spell, whether out of irony or hope, “Love is All, All is Love.” The installation’s political point seems excessively blunt, but according to a gallery staff member, that was part of the plan. “Our artist was into showing on the street because it let him fit his ideas directly into American reality and American life.”

Parked in front of a drug store on a busy stretch of 8th avenue, FRAME, the Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, has the most potential to draw in curious pedestrians not necessarily looking to see recent video work, and offers two short films by Finnish artist Jani Ruscica. The sounds of screeching brakes and honking cars inevitably penetrate the container's metal walls, and the work was chosen accordingly. Beatbox / Batbox (2008) follows a group of New Yorkers practicing the Bronx-born art of the human beat box and a British bio-acoustics researcher examining a small bat, tracing a relationship between sound and geography.

New York gallery The Proposition responds to the street noise by adding to the clamor in its container, on 10th Avenue, just a few blocks from its 22nd Street space. Though the gallery is showing a silent work by Tom Jarmusch (brother of Jim) documenting QUIET, the storied 1999–2000 project by New York artist Alfredo Martinez, (edition 1 of 5 was available for $1,200), the other two works in the show compete with the traffic. Chinese artist Zhou Xiaohu, who is best known for his animation work, presents The Gooey Gentleman (edition 2 of 3 with BETA master tape was $36,000), an allegory of courtship told by figures drawn on the chest and stomach of the artist and a female foil. The work’s soundtrack, a well-known Shanghai love song, provides the accidental background for another animation, this one a ranting figure by David Caspe (edition 1 of 3, $800). The cacophony made it difficult to concentrate on a single work for any amount of time, but the street-vendor feel of the booth lent itself well to the mix of clever and aggressive video. “We were going to have headphones, but it was so loud out here that I just cranked up the volume,” said Proposition gallery assistant Jacob Williams, who added that he had nearly been hit by a car while sitting outside the container.

ALP Galleries also set up like a typical art-fair booth, though its West 24th Street location proved quieter than those along the avenues. Their exhibition is devoted to video by Darmstadt, Germany-based Willi Bucher. In the front of the container, the landscapes and abstract animations of Dream of Malevich (edition 3 of 5, priced at $6,750) and Homage to Rodchenko (edition 1 of 5, also priced at $6,750) show the artist’s background as a graphic designer and a painter, while in the back, four video projectors flash images onto glass cubes facing one another — the artist calls them “beboxxes” — creating mystical, flickering apparitions. The ghost-in-the-machine effect, however, gets lost in the glare from the other projectors inside the cramped space, a downside of showing in a shipping container according to four-year DiVA veteran Maria Anna Alp.

ALP’s neighbor on 24th Street, Yuanfen Center for Contemporary Art, the Beijing project of Asher Remy-Toledo, a New York dealer, and David Ben-Kay, who previously ran an art and event space in the Beijing location, presented a less cluttered booth-style installation. Four versions of Hong Kong–based Hung Keungs 1998 work I Love My Country’s Sky, which shows tight close-ups of people’s faces as they pucker their lips into slow-motion kisses, were loaded onto PlayStation Portable video game systems hung in a mobile-like configuration in the center of the container. The work is complemented by a video by Polish-born, New York–based artist Monika Weiss, Keimail III (2008), screening at the back of the space. Assistant director Julian Navarro says that the gallery wanted to strike a balance between street-side event and functional fair booth. “We want people to come and see the art,” he said, “not the installation.”

The decision to drop the hotel component, explained Thierry Alet, Frère Independent director of exhibitions, came about because DiVA’s organizers and exhibitors wanted to set the event apart from the other fairs. “We have too much competition, and we wanted a format that is more interesting,” he said. “The hotel is getting old, and at the same time we don’t have enough exhibitors to rent a huge tent at Lincoln center or something.” Alet is confident the event will help exhibitors connect with collectors and curators seeking digital work. “It’s not like some of the fairs where you come in, pick out your art, and go home,” he says. “A lot of communication happens.”

Louise Blouin Media, ARTINFO’s parent company, is a sponsor of the DiVA fair.