Putting On A Protest (You Pick The Topic)

From left, protesters Paula Crawford, Edgar Endress, Sue Wrbican and Sean Watkins. (Courtesy Of Edgar Endress)

Lazy activists, rejoice. You can now outsource protesting.

An art group called the Floating Lab Collective is performing a piece called "Protesting on Demand" this weekend at four District locations. Members of the group will stage three-minute protests on topics suggested in e-mails from across the world, from the Iraq war to guns to, at the request of a Manassas resident, the view that "breast feeding is not obscene."

"Protesting on Demand" is just one event in Multimediale, a four-day art festival that starts today. Provisions Library, a resource center for activism and the arts in Dupont Circle, will serve as the hub for the festival.

The name Multimediale is a nod to European art surveys such as the Venice Biennale. The man behind Multimediale is Niels Van Tomme, who just moved to Washington from Belgium.

"I came to D.C. and I thought I would experience all this exciting, radical, political art," Van Tomme said. "I didn't find any of these things."

His guess is that people in Washington are so enmeshed in politics they look to art as an escape. So Van Tomme, a 30-year-old curator with a film background, created his own venue for political art. Multimediale will include an exhibition, a panel discussion, a lecture, live performances and a video art screening called "You are my torture / I am your chamber."

At Provisions Library over the weekend, this is what radical political art in Washington looks like:

· A video game by Brian Judy called "My US Rep," where the gamer assumes the identity of his or her House representative. The purpose of the game is to keep the representative alive as he or she navigates a world of legislation, money and art.

· A performance piece by Fereshteh Toosi in which she will dress as a nurse and discuss the U.S. government with random people over a cup of tea.