Their new station in life

The gallery is empty. The lights are off. The heat is turned down.

Exit Green Street Gallery, James Hull's maverick nonprofit art space at the Green Street MBTA station.

Enter AXIOM, the alternative gallery for new and electronic media. Executive director Heidi Kayser and codirector Phaedra Shanbaum officially took over on Monday, the first day of the new year.

When they stop in late last week, the place is chilly and dark.

"I think this is how you turn on the heat," says Shanbaum, scrutinizing a fuse box in the space's utility closet. She's arrived first and is making the gallery habitable for an afternoon chat. "James told us not to turn the heat on in one area, because it might melt the sofa."

AXIOM Gallery, which Kayser helped found as a collective three years ago, has bounced from space to space, most recently sharing quarters with Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge. Although it has been nomadic, the gallery has garnered a reputation for wit, originality, and adventurous programming, with a roster of artists ranging from undergrads to internationally known new media bigwigs such as Michael Rees andBenedict Sheehan . Last November, the show "Art Cake" featured works that were not only new media, but edible. And, one hopes, tasty. One piece by Rob Coshow, "CrabCakes," consisted of robotic crabs made from actual crab-cake batter.

At Green Street, Kayser and Shanbaum have found a home they plan to stay in.

The women, both 26, are feisty and creative, and AXIOM is a natural for high-tech Boston, a city crawling with new-media artists clamoring for venues to show their work.

"It's very significant that new media are attracting their own gallery," says George Fifield , director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. "Boston is such an academic city, and most new media have been in academic settings. The commercial Boston art scene, until the late 1990s, didn't pay attention to new media. Neither did museums. The awareness is only recent, and we have such a large population of artists who live here. Its time has come."

Kayser, a waifish art geek with pale blue eyes under a cloud of strawberry-blond dreadlocks, pulls into the gallery late, coming from her job at a design firm. It's cold, so she keeps on her down jacket, sits on a tabletop, and smiles at Shanbaum. "I like your hair," she says.

It's a new color -- nearly black. "George dyed my hair. His wife cuts my hair," Shanbaum reports. That's George Fifield. Shanbaum has a day job at Boston Cyberarts. The new-media community can be quite chummy.

Both women grew up using computers; they've never known a world without them, and the way they operate has been shaped by the digital age.

"Art is supposed to be a comment on contemporary culture," Kayser points out. "It makes sense to use the media that reflects our culture to create that comment."

Kayser started AXIOM fresh out of Massachusetts College of Art, where she did most of her work in the Studio for Interrelated Media. Students there create work incorporating the Web, digital video, interactive media, and such elements as dance, music, and theater.

"At SIM, I learned hands-on," Kayser says. "If we wanted to have a show, we'd find a room, paint it, put up the lights, plug in the extension cords." She learned just as much there about presenting artwork as she did about making it.

Somebody needed to do it.

"I was going to school with all these students, all doing experimental work, and even the master's students had nowhere to show their work," she says. "So some friends and I rented a space in Allston and did informal shows."

Shanbaum came on board last year. She'd been wowed by AXIOM's first show at the Cyberarts Festival in April 2005. At the time, Shanbaum was still in grad school, getting an arts administration degree at Boston University.

"I thought what she was doing was utterly fantastic," Shanbaum says. When she got out of school last spring, she signed on as codirector. While Kayser keeps busy as the installation whiz kid, Shanbaum has taken over fund-raising, publicity, and outreach. Like the rest of their part-time staff of eight, the two are volunteers. Until they started raising money, many of AXIOM's expenses were coming out of the two women's pockets.

But it hasn't been hard to find help of all kinds.

"Heidi's had a huge amount of support from local artists," says SIM professor Dana Moser. They know they can come to AXIOM and have their ideas heard and possibly realized.

"Many venues have a long lead time," Moser says. " You need to book far in advance. Things that are experimental and innovative, that don't already come in a frame, things that involve tinkering or performance -- AXIOM is the spot for those kinds of things."

Look at "iArt," opening Jan. 12, showcasing video art made for handheld devices. Artist Ravi Jain's car, where he has recorded his own video blog while commuting, will be driven into the space. Viewers can sit in the car, view Jain's vlog, and record their own. John Herman's "The Man Who Was Thursday" is a project featuring a band made up of 25 people all over the world who responded to Herman's cryptic posts on Craigslist and then took part in his offbeat challenges to compose music together -- such as setting a drumbeat to the musician's heart rate . The group will perform via an Internet feed at the opening.

Future plans include a summer show all about reflective surfaces and a fall exhibit of solo work by local video artist Denise Marika . With technology constantly upgrading and digital media such an intrinsic part of most people's worlds, the potential for new, exciting work is vast.

"So much media bombards us," says Kayser. "If we're going to be surrounded by it, we should use it for art."