Yes, it started last night with a program of strange sex shorts at the Pacific Cinémathí¨que, and yes, it continues on through Sunday (April 17) with a series of screenings at Video In, but the big news about this year's Signal and Noise festival is that the noise factor has been turned way up. Last year's event included one evening of radical music-making; this year, both live and pre-recorded electroacoustic music will be featured every night. According to curator Velveeta Krisp, audio art is booming in Vancouver, and Signal and Noise's new focus reflects that fact.

"I think it's totally exciting, and for me it makes me want to be able to facilitate that growth any way I can," says the filmmaker and performance artist, calling from the Video In offices on Main Street.

Krisp doggedly refuses to single out any particular artists for the spotlight-or rather she starts to, and then clams up. "I think it's all going to be incredible," she explains, adding that the artists in the show are not limited to Vancouver; some come from as far away as France and Croatia. But even if she were willing to name names, they might not mean very much: this is a festival for emerging artists, for people you haven't heard of yet. More instructive is a visit to the Signal and Noise Web site (www .signalandnoise.ca/), where Krisp has posted sound clips of most of the participating audio artists. One constant is that they are primarily working with computer-processed material: it seems the laptop has replaced the recording studio for most emerging electronic composers. Within that restriction, however, there is a multiplicity of approaches. Some are using only computer-generated micro-sounds; some are processing conventional instruments; some-like Seattle's intriguing Phonographers Union, who'll perform the festival's closing set-use audio-vérité soundscape recordings as the starting point for free jazz-style improvisation.

Oddly enough, for more conventional sonics one has to look to the visual component of Signal and Noise. Some of the short flicks on the event's promo reel-including Meesoo Lee's "Moonshot" and Dandilion Wind Opaine Schlase's "Flooded Grass"-play like low-tech music videos, their images subservient to the low-fi rock noises they accompany. Others are more about reinventing the wheel: Gale Allen's "Re-Performance: Freeing the Voice" finds the artist screaming at the top of her lungs in the middle of downtown Calgary, just like Tunnel Canary's Ebra Wiwchar did at the corner of Granville and Georgia streets during Vancouver's original punk explosion. (Sadly, the reasons to scream have not gone away during the ensuing years.) Some-like Jennifer Matotek's "Cats and Pants", which seems much longer than its 60- second running time-are just silly. And some are quite lovely, like Jason Arsenault's "Hydr(o)", in which a drowning scene becomes an abstract painting, or perversely fascinating, like Natalie Rich- Fernandez's "Mollusc", in which the artist's tongue presses against the camera lens to become a shape-shifting sea creature.

The point is that Signal and Noise is about diversity-and about art you won't see anywhere else. "Everybody deserves the opportunity to present their work professionally," argues Krisp, adding that Vancouver's underground arts scene has grown to the point that it can no longer be contained by places like Video In or the Western Front. "There's a whole new league of spaces and places that have been opened up by artists' collectives that don't want to weed through the bureaucracy to get into the more established artist-run centres," she says. "Either they don't like the politics, or they want to program from their vision, and they obviously feel that they have a different vision than the artist-run centres. Now, having worked here I do realize that there are systems that you have to go through in order to show your work, but there are also a lot of people saying, 'We're not going to wait for you to decide that what we're doing is valid. We're doing it on our own, and you're going to want to be part of it.'"

And so Signal and Noise is Video In's bid to be part of the new. It also happens to be a great chance for interested parties to survey the underground in all its chaotic, contradictory, brilliant, and banal diversity. Thanks to Krisp's anything-goes curatorial stance, chances are that you might find yourself bored or even offended by some of what Signal and Noise has to offer. But with its emphasis on the creative use of new technologies that are now within every artist's reach, the event also offers a chance to witness fresh worlds of art in the making-and how often do we get to see the future being born?