Exhibit playfully melds text and video

Nancy Davies's ''Riders on the Train Project."

We don't tend to think of text and video in the same breath, or if we do, it has to do with subtitles. I, for one, have an aversion to subtitles, so it was with trepidation that I went to see "Text in Video," now at Axiom. The show, organized by Phaedra Shanbaum and Autumn Ahn, turns out to be accessible and playful, with one or two exceptions.

Text can be problematic even in paintings; it often competes with the visual, rather than supplements it. One video here delightfully melds the two: Lior Neiger's "Intellectual Property" animates those two words, stretching them, replicating them, and bouncing them until they expand into a bar code and nearly shed their textual meaning. Neiger pares intellectual property down to a scannable commodity, adding tart meaning to the concept of a marketplace of ideas.

The text in Bebe Beard's "Riddle Me This" consists of elementary school riddles. She answers them with scenarios so simple they're funny. "What did 0 say to 8?" crawls across the screen, as we watch a hand bind a jelly doughnut, and then a glazed one, with a plastic cord - doughnut bondage that is, up close, oddly beautiful to watch. Then the answer pops up: "Nice belt." Ba-dum-bum.

Monica Gunderson's "Drawing Within Drawing" is also funny. Gunderson made a blue wall drawing with the word "drawing" predominant; she projects a video of herself drawing on the wall right on top of it. It's a clever play on the tension between figure and ground, with the artist as the figure. Or is she the ground? The piece factors in the larger world of the artist's imagination as a metaphysical background for the work.

Perfect for Axiom's setting at the Green Street MBTA station on the Orange Line, Nancy Davies's "Riders on the Train Project" presents the private thoughts of subway riders (collected by the artist) as flitting text over a rushing video looking out the window of a subway. "I look up, then down." "I read my book." The work tellingly describes how people on the T maintain personal space in a very public place.

One in-your-face video, "leeds.talk.04" by Tony Cokes, is really for art insiders and feels exclusionary. Cokes took text from a lecture by critic Julian Stallabrass and presents it, word by word, at an aggressive, though not illegible, speed. Cokes critiques the critic, interpreting and re-presenting his text in a way that may not change the meaning, but certainly flavors the experience of reading it. How would this strategy work with, say, "Goodnight, Moon" or the Bible?

The weakest pieces in "Text in Video" are by the team of Daniel C. Howe and Aya Karpinska. Both computer pieces build on the idea of found text. In the technically dodgy "open.ended," which froze twice when I attempted to use it, the user manipulates nested, translucent cubes with changing text on every face to match up unexpected phrases on the computer screen. It's about as clever as refrigerator poetry.

Their second work, "No Time Machine," pairs bits of text gleaned from the Internet in a search for "no time." Some pairings are random, some are made by the artists; most come across as ham-handed. This may be text, but although it's presented as dialogue and poetry, it's hardly good writing.

Anyone for tennis?
Peter Sis is best known as a children's-book illustrator and author, but he's also a filmmaker. The Czech-born artist came to the United States in 1982 to make a film for the Czech government about the 1984 Winter Olympics. The project was canned, but Sis stayed in America and was granted asylum. His 1982 short animated film, "Players," a vision of athleticism and aggression that is both sweet and harrowing, is on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center's Media Test Wall.

Sis's protagonists are two tennis icons of the day, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, each neatly drawn in the artist's economical but expressive hand. Borg has a conical beard; McEnroe has a fuzz-topped head. They meet in a giant stadium. As they volley, the tennis ball and the athletes morph into weapons and warriors. Sis vaults us through the history of conflict. We see cannonades and naval battles, Napoleon leading his troops, brass knuckles and boxing gloves. By the time the two players shake hands at game's end, they have massacred their audience.

The animation is like that of a children's cartoon, simple and charming, and the action is as comical and surprising as it is swift (Sis covers centuries in all of seven minutes). But the artist's message is somber; there's no suggestion that athletic competition is a healthy way to vent aggression. McEnroe, who had a tendency to throw tantrums on the court, was never a model of sportsmanship, so he's an ideal character for Sis's narrative. For this artist, who grew up during the Cold War, aggression is dangerous and can be unleashed on a whim, as easily as lobbing a tennis ball.