The Lowdown: reasonable & senseless: a technical disaster is the latest media-based project by local artist/curator Donna Szoke. Focusing on disaster as a preordained event, Szoke, Michael Alstad, and K.D. Thornton look to complicate our understanding of catastrophes as spectacular and unforeseen phenomena separate from some of the technological advances that make them possible in the first place.

Coordinates: reasonable & senseless runs at the Surrey Art Gallery until July 10. The opening reception is Friday (May 27), and Alstad gives an artist's talk at Video In on Monday (May 30).

Process-oriented: Szoke's work is informed by her interest in and experimentation with language, and she's particularly intrigued by the relationship between text and moving images. Szoke's 13-channel video installation, which has the same title as the group show, reconfigures a selection of filmed disasters ranging from a careening crop-duster to a car crash and even a hilarious series of domestic accidents. The short movies have been borrowed from the Prelinger Archives of on-line film ephemera and cut to make loops ranging from one to three minutes in duration. These loops appear individually on two rows of 20 miniature LCD monitors, with the text "reasonable & senseless" superimposed over them in a new-media version of black humour.

What it all Means: "In researching the archives I kept pulling out small moments that were beautiful and horrible at the same time, like these gorgeous nuclear mushroom clouds unfurling in the already-cloudy sky," says Szoke at her Main street studio. "There's also the fact that I'm like any North American sucker: seduced by technology."