By Rachel Beckman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 19, 2007

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.

· An installation called "America's Grave," a symbolic burial site for the nation, by artists John James Anderson and Randall Packer. According to the artists, the United States died on Jan. 20, 2005, the day of President Bush's second inauguration. Packer will deliver a eulogy on Saturday night.

Packer, an assistant professor of multimedia art at American University, helped organize the event; before Van Tomme moved to Washington from Brussels, Packer connected him with the Washington art community. Van Tomme had read Packer's 2001 book, "Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality," in film school. He moved to Washington last summer to be with his wife, a research assistant at the National Gallery of Art.

"The link with Randall was very important for me when I was moving to Washington," Van Tomme says. "I knew there was somebody who was like-minded."

Van Tomme has elaborate reasoning behind Multimediale besides filling what he sees as a void of political art in Washington. He wrote a three-page treatise on the theory behind his curatorial decisions and how they fit into the landscape of contemporary art, titling it, "THIS EXHIBITION IS MORE THAN JUST A SHOW!"

"At this specific time in history at this specific geopolitical place, it's time for something more relevant than the fetish of technology," he wrote. "Which way to go with the 'new media' that we have been exploring?"

Van Tomme discovered art when he was 14 and a fan of the seminal noise-rock band Sonic Youth. He also remembers a radical contemporary art exhibition in Brussels that opened his eyes to the avant-garde.

"He has a tendency of intellectualizing everything, even stuff that is popular entertainment," said his wife, Sonja Simonyi. "He's always looking for quality. We religiously watch 'The Wire' and 'The Sopranos,' but he would never watch something that he considers bad."

As for the protests on demand, there's still time to submit ideas at http://www.floatinglabcollective.org. But don't bother raging over antibacterial soap; protest organizer Edgar Endress said that someone from Maryland already submitted a request for a protest to "stop this hyper-hygienic madness."

Multimediale runs at various locations through Sunday, including Provisions Library, 1611 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. 202-299-0460. See http://www.multimedialedc.org for a complete schedule of events.