This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier exhibits — which try to expand film and video into art-installation settings — will have at least one famous face among the artists.

Actor, writer and filmmaker James Franco will be one of the 14 artists whose work will be on display at New Frontier this January, in its new home at the Park City Miners Hospital, 1354 Park Avenue, Park City (across the street from the Park City Library Center) — and, for the first time, at the Salt Lake Art Center, 20 S. West Temple, Salt Lake City. The exhibits will be on display Jan. 20-29.

Franco's work is "Three's Company: The Drama," a multi-media look at the '70s sitcom that looks at TV from "a slightly oblique perspective."

Franco is no stranger to Sundance, having premiered "Howl" there early this year. And, of course, he was in Utah recently filming Danny Boyle's "127 Hours."

Here are details about the other works coming to New Frontier:

• "A Machine to See With," by the British interactive-media arts group Blast Theory, invites participants to "connect the fantasy of a thriller movie with the political questions that each one of us must face." The work mixes documentary footage, Jean-Luc Godard films and stolen thriller cliches.

• "All That is Solid Melts Into Air," by artist Mark Boulos (who splits his time between London and Amsterdam), plays two documentary videos on opposite walls — one of a Nigerian guerrilla group fighting to keep their nation's petroleum resources, the other of Chicago stock traders speculating on futures.

• "We Like America and America Likes Us (The Corpse)" by the New York collective The Bruce High Quality Foundation, that involves a hearse/ambulance and symbolizes "a showing of dark patriotism and a yearning for the possibility of transcendent national purpose while holding the contradictions and let-downs of history."

• "SPIN" and "HIPOCAMPO 2," by Spain's Daniel Canogar, are two works about the ephemeral nature of technology — one sculpture shows 100 discarded DVDs, with the images taken from those discs projected back on them; the other is made from tangles of cables, with lights projected onto them "creating an illusion of the motion of electricity through time and space."

• "After Ghostcatching," in which the famed choreographer Bill T. Jones and OpenEnded Group re-envision his 1999 work "Ghostcatching," with 3D projection (and, for the viewers, 3D glasses).

• "Theater III + Edgar" by Iranian-born artist Avish Khebrehzadeh, links three dream-like vignettes involving a pregnant woman, a hole and the man who has been gigging it.

• "Moony," by Japanese artists Akio Kamisato, Satoshi Shibata and Takehisa Mashimo of the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences, in which the images of butterflies are projected onto steam — which becomes an interactive interface.

• "The Johnny Cash Project" and "The Wilderness Downtown," by data visualization artist Aaron Koblin and music-video director Chris Milk, are paired projects — one invites visitors to draw something that is woven into a collective animated music video of Johnny Cash's song "Ain't No Grave"; the other an interactive film using HTML5 programming and Google Maps to make personalized videos to the Arcade Fire song "We Used to Wait."

• "! WOMEN ART REVOLUTION" and "RAW/WAR" are both by filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson ("Strange Culture"). The first is a documentary about the Feminist Art Movement, from 1968 to now. The second is a community-created video archive linked to the documentary.

• "Myth and Infrastructure" and "Dreaming of Lucid Living" are by L.A. animator/artist Miwa Matreyek. The first (pictured above) is a multi-media performance in which Matreyek's body "becomes part of a layered world of animation, light and shadow," with music sung by Anna Oxygen. The second uses shadow and animation to delve into "themes of domestic spaces, dream-like vignettes, large and small cities, magical powers."

• "Glowing Pathfinder Bugs," an interactive installation by the British collaborative group Squidsoup, that projects virtual bugs on a real sandpit — and visitors are invited to play in the sand, and watch the bugs react to that.

• "ELEPHANT," the second segment in American media artist Deke Weaver's lifelong project "The Unreliable Bestiary," which tells stories of animals and their worlds.

• "Pandemic 1.0," by U.S. writer/director Lance Weiler, which will tell a story during the course of the festival — using film, online, mobile, real-world, social gaming and data visualization — about what happens when a sleep virus hits a small town's adults, leaving the youth fighting for survival.