Since the ad appeared, Willy Mal (the name he's using for this project) has sold 100 copies of the Exoptic Fields tape. He decided to aim the second "deflective" video at something more compelling than turning off the television: sex. He enlisted video artist Benton-C Bainbridge to produce a video to pull viewers' eyes toward the bodies in the room. The result is the 45-minute "Blind Heat." Bainbridge and Mal chose the length because it was 10 times the national average for coitus, according to a stat they read somewhere.

Mal's exoptic fields concept includes a smidgen of optical science about which colors are perceived better with peripheral vision (blue, green and yellow). The first Exoptic Fields video employs those principles: It's one hour of a brick wall turning slowly blue, then greenish yellow, then blue again from a horizontal line in the middle outwards. It is boring but vaguely pleasant, something that could decorate a nightclub wall. I didn't make it all the way through, but I didn't feel my eyes pushed away either.

"Blind Heat" is much more watchable, even though Mal's ad copy claims that it too works through "benign sensory negation -- 'deflection' -- in electronic media. Such deflective media strive to subtract all stimulation." Bainbridge liked the idea of "taking over the home entertainment center," but he tweaked the exoptic concept somewhat. He doesn't want people to avert their eyes, but rather to pay the same peripheral attention they pay to music, which he refers to as "decorating the air." His aim is for "people to use video to shape a visual space the way music shapes a sonic space."

He made "Blind Heat" using analog audio/video synthesis, which dates back to Nam June Paik's work in the 1960s, but is rarely employed in these digital times. "The same electrical signals used to make sound can be used to make video, though not that many people know that," he says. "There's only one studio in the world dedicated to this kind of work that the public can use." He spent a week setting up the software, then "painted" the piece live, in real time, with a synthesizer.

"Blind Heat" is visual make-out music for people who prefer DJ Spooky to Sinatra. It sounds like stripped-down ambient, a drum machine subtly distorted and stretched. But "Blind Heat" doesn't look like other high-tech video art, which all too often resembles a software demonstration. It's more like a vaguely biological Abstract Expressionist painting dancing and marching to skittering rhythms.

The packaging plays with the porn association: The videotape is red, with a painted X in the middle. The spine reads "Blind Heat: set your love life on fire," then in tiny print "(no nudity or sex acts depicted)." Both men say they find porno generally crude and stupid; Bainbridge calls it "less sexy than even advertising!"

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk