CURRENT VIEWING: Frances Stark: "My Best Thing" On view until February 2012: MoMA PS1

Film still from "My Best Thing." 2011

This weekend I ventured into the fascinating industrial-scape around Long Island City, odd home to MoMA PS1, which gets pioneering cred for breaching an art culture in this unlikely location. But maybe its not so unlikely. Perhaps LIC is doomed to the fate of of Soho or the far west reaches of Chelsea, the two earlier colonized 20th century industrial belts of the city.

What's that backdrop got to do with Frances Strak's " My Best Thing" ? This particular work provoked thoughts about the digitalization of art culture and the way it has obliterated the very 20th century ideas of locale and identity. "My Best Thing " is a feature-length animation in the form of a serialized soap opera, constructed from interactions in online video chat rooms. As an artist known for her works on paper , Stark has opened up her oeuvre to use performance, sculpture and video to address the dynamic between technology and popular culture. As such she amplifies how much identity in the 21st century is a mindscape all of its own. Suddenly the 20th century industrial is its own form of romance.

Images, all: Frances Stark. Film still from My Best Thing. 2011. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne and Berlin; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles; and greengrassi, London.