In videos, seeing is experiencing

CAMBRIDGE -- Victor Burgin offers no introductory text to his single-channel video installation "The Little House," in the Sert Gallery at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The visitor walks in bare, ignorant of Burgin's intriguing sources.

The experience is lush and haunting. The video, projected large in a dark room, sweeps through a sparse Modernist house and garden to the accompaniment of a text, read aloud by a woman. The text is part libertine novel, with a lothario attempting to seduce a lady, part mouth-watering passages on interior design. Every now and then, the tour stops , and a young Asian woman appears holding a small book. The piece evokes desire, heaving like an eager bosom against a tightly laced bodice of restraint: Barbara Cartland meets Frank Lloyd Wright.

For decades, Burgin has been a leading light of conceptual art and an avowed feminist. "The Little House" patiently and methodically leads us into territory fraught with the tension between desire and its pale satisfaction. The house is Rudolph Michael Schindler's Kings Road House, built in Hollywood in 1922 for two couples in open marriages; divorce ensued.

The steamy text, Jean-François de Bastide's 1758 novel "La Petite Maison," follows a wager: the Marquis de Tremicour bets that a tour of his house will bring the virtuous Melite to his bed. Burgin's version, on a video loop, never reaches that end; he suspends resolution.

The Asian woman holds Mao's Little Red Book. The woman is the video's keystone. She might represent Melite, or the room "a la Chinoise" in the little house, a symbol of Westerners' coveting of the mysterious East. But Burgin's cultural revolution is far gentler than Mao's is . It's a spiral of yearning and resistance through centuries and across continents.

Hans Tutschku, more a composer than a visual artist, has two interactive installations up at the Carpenter Center, under the umbrella title "Tell Me! . . . a secret . . ." The more successful piece invites the viewer into a blackened room, its floor covered with white gravel. Video of lapping water projects onto the gravel; when you step into the piece, the water sloshes delightfully. It's an intimate, empowering experience in a beautiful space.

The other piece has the fun quotient that many interactive pieces do, but it doesn't pull together conceptually. Tutschku has attached microphones to large, partially abstract photos "inspired by" a multimedia performance in which he was involved . They swish with theatrical gestures and overly operatic chiaroscuro. Speak into a microphone; your voice sets off responding sounds and echoes. The sound component is engaging, but what's the point of telling a secret to a photograph?

There's more such fun at Art Interactive, where Camille Utterback, one of interactive video's pioneers, has set up "Animated Gestures." The viewer steps in front of a screen (or in one case, between two screens), and his or her movements are captured by an overhead camera and transcribed on screen in paint smears, sprays of dots, and spidery drawings. It's full-body virtual finger painting.

The Kandinsky-like gestures on one of Utterback's screens constantly morph. It may be fun, but there's no real aesthetic satisfaction, no guiding eye except your own amateur one in the images that coalesce and disperse as you move about. Scott Snibbe's "Shadow Play" at Art Interactive in 2005 was more conceptually provocative; toying with your own shadow suggested engaging with your dark side. There has to be an element beyond the whiz-bang to make interactive art substantive. Utterback's work is technologically impressive and playful, but not much more.

Hiroyuki Hamada's small retrospective at Pierre Menard Gallery feels like a show strewn with artifacts used for sacred rituals. The sculptures have a weighty and disturbing presence.

Hamada has been exhibiting since the mid-1990s, and his early paintings and drawings are interesting only in how they hint at his iconic sculptures. He makes domes, lozenges, and squares out of plaster. Then he scores them, drills them, and pours tar into the crevices. Each piece feels monolithic, with a surface as varied and intriguing as the moon .

The hemisphere of "#37" rises from the wall to a single black round, like an eye's pupil. Pale plaster drilled with holes surrounds it. Several circles rim each hole; each circle is delineated with tar. From a distance, this surface has a silvery glow, and crawls with its pockmarks.

Hamada scored the thick plaster disk of "#41" with delicate lines radiating from the center; they drop perfectly over the edge toward the wall. They're so straight and intricate ; they're a marvel of craftsmanship. These, too, are tar-filled, and at the center , the lines erupt in a powdery brown cloud of tar. It is mussed, precise , and imposing.

In her catalog essay for the show, Lydia Millet calls Hamada's work "perfect and deranged at once." She's right; these pieces look skewed and scarred, like the embodiment of struggle, but they also have gravity, and a kind of wisdom.