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 Keung’s 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.”