Since August, I've been making regular visits to Thermostat: Video and the Pacific Northwest, a 90-minute loop of short videos by 17 artists that's projected, large, in the public-living-room area on the third floor of the Seattle Art Museum. I've become attached to it, preoccupied with its preoccupation: music and landscape.

In one video, the camera runs along the silvery contours of drum stands, follows the sinuous line of electrical cords, rides over knobs on a mixing board—the landscape is the physical manifestation of a rock band, and not just any band, but the Rolling Stones, recording their hit "Sympathy for the Devil." Jean-Luc Godard tried to make a film of this process, but the producers took the film in another direction, focusing instead on the end product of the song; by inserting contemporary footage of a band rehearsing along with some from the Stones' session, the artist duo Hadley + Maxwell restore Godard's intention to make a study of music not only in time but in space, in objects. The song, interrupted by the cuts, is never able to settle into a rhythm or to finish, and the faces of the performers are not seen. A certain physicality and open-endedness comes back into the otherwise fixed, overly familiar song.

In dance, music is the landscape for the bodies. But when the dancer is a surfboard alone in the surf, as in Shannon Oksanen's sepia-toned video Vanishing Point, and the sound is the grooving roil of a surf guitar, it's hard to say which came first. One seems like nothing without the other; together they are a symbol for lonely, restless freedom. Likewise, Kevin Schmidt's plugged-in solo guitar performance of "Stairway to Heaven" on the beach (his Marshall amp is hooked up to a generator next to him on a wagon) is proof of the unity in symbolism between certain scenes and certain songs.

There's music in almost every video, replacing spoken language with abstraction. A wash of sound provides a soft sonic padding to the explosive fight between girls in Jeremy Shaw's voyeuristic 7 Minutes. Anne Mathern's intense, unsmiling lip-synch of the Italian song "Come Stai" references stage performance, but she's on a pickup truck, riding across the countryside, being punished by wind.

In films, music can be a human overlay on what would otherwise be inert nature. But Thermostat—named for the human-made automatic weather-controller—mixes and remixes the terms of the movie soundtrack, the music video, and the art video using landscape as a base. Ron Tran mic'd a bunch of instruments lying flat on a pier arranged like a band: snares in back, guitars in front, tambourine and keyboard in the middle. He covered the instruments with bird food; pigeons come and play a "set" with their pecking. The video is called The Peckers. That's the band name. recommended