A larger, more ambitious project in progress by American artist twins Doug and Mike Starn, Big Bambú, is making an appearance near the fair’s entrance at the booth of Stockholm-based Wetterling Gallery. Two documentary videos and a digital rendering show the construction of an intricate structure that the Starns have created by lashing together thousands of bamboo poles. The 50-foot-high architectural installation, begun in September, is contained within the former Tallix Fine Arts Foundry in Beacon, New York, and will continually evolve over the course of the artists’ two-year residency there. Copies of the documentary videos (not editioned as stand-alone works) will be packaged with D17, the duo’s first painting, which was done this year and depicts a detail of the bamboo network traced on vellum and overlaid on an inkjet rendering, for $25,000.

Large-scale moving images get further attention in the fair’s Art Video/New Media lounge, a new section that proved popular at the opening despite the frigid temperatures caused by air-conditioning being piped into the already chilly viewing rooms. Curator Asher Remy-Toledo collaborated with six international art institutions — from the nearby Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation to the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv — to organize the lounge’s program.

Videos by rising Israeli artist Sigalit Landau exploring the creative process play inside the CCA’s viewing quarters, while projections of hypnotic footage by Miami-based Lebanese artist Theresa Diehl flank the entrance to this sector. Diehl creates a soundless depiction of the “contradictions of everyday life” in the Middle East by juxtaposing the dreaminess of a call to prayer at a madrasa with a crowd of youth that began to riot as she filmed in Tripoli in May 2007. She later digitally blurred and slowed down the action to downplay the documentary nature of the footage and instead evoke a “state of suspension” that encourages the viewer “to focus on the moment as it exists…to study every gesture.”  

Surprisingly critical commentaries on China at a crossroads are presented by the separate Iberia and Ullens Centers for Contemporary Art in Beijing. A crowd stood transfixed before Mist, a 2008 digital animation by Zhang Xiatao, which envisions armies of insects infesting the industrial infrastructure that is transforming the Chinese landscape and then marching into Tibet — the whole work a kind of symbol of the global affront to the spiritual soul of ancient Chinese culture. Feng Mengbo’s video game Long March! Restart riffs on Chairman Mao’s infamous historical event.

The use of new technology to examine the effects of globalization is indicative of the current ethos — a sentiment “embedded in this particular moment,” according to Remy-Toledo. “Art has become a commodity that has robbed the soul of art.” That this large space devoted to critical works — showcased by nonprofits, no less — steals the show from the commercial center of the fair may itself represent a prophetic shift in focus.