I like to dance, but I rarely have a good time doing it. I have spent nights traveling from house to warehouse and back again, looking for that inexplicable combination of music and geography that triggers the dance-mind, the thing that makes your head go inward and makes all those exterior things paradoxically not matter. I have tried to lose myself in the group and failed.

What is this thing? What is it? This is what I asked myself during my visit to SIFF's genre-crossing Exploding Cinema series. DJ Riz--bless him--failed to ignite the crowd at EMP, despite his mind-bendy, ultra-danceable electronica, despite the high-tech graphics produced by the Spaceboat TV guys at a bank of computers and projected onto a big, fancy JumboTron. There was one guy dancing, a refugee from clerical world, in his white shirt and black pants and trance induced (it seemed to me) by sheer will; everyone else was sitting on the floor, expectant, jittery, a little bored. I couldn't figure out how such a wealth of resources could produce so dull an effect. The ambient graphics looked unaccountably like logos, not particularly startling or transcendent, with a single beautiful riff involving cathedral windows. This must be due to EMP's utter sanitizing effect, the problem of serving up underground culture all neat and clean to people who don't want to look very hard for it, a sterile approximation of what happens when truly innovative minds bang together in the right time and place. Stubborn and perverse about the mainstreaming of underground culture, I found myself unwilling to be part of this group, no matter how ignited they might become.

Then the lights and frantic graphics went down, and from somewhere came the sound of unrhythmic clapping, and then the cheesiest apocalyptic opening possible: Prince's voice booming out of the darkness, "We are gathered here today...." And there was DJ Spooky, in an old baseball shirt and khaki cap, as diffident a presence as Riz is an unignorable one. Everything changed. The vibe became palpably darker, the space closed in, and it seemed like he was going to give us what we wanted, that unnamable quality that makes a dance party explode, that makes the drugs kick in. Instead, he had a nasty little surprise in store for us.

A smaller screen was lowered in front of the JumboTron, and what appeared--against a background of hiphop's most significant source music (funk and Kraftwerk)--was Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, a montage of film clips punctuated by sections (in subtitles) of his 1967 book of the same name. Society of the Spectacle is a treatise on the tyranny of the mediated image; it tears down the false premise of unity that the group spectacle--film, political rally, street fair--offers, and serves it back to us as evidence that we've ceased to think for ourselves. This was the life work of the Situationists (of which Debord was one), who used the tools of Dada and surrealism to destabilize the ossified categories of art and culture, and take them out of their separate little mailboxes and throw them into everyday life, toward a new model of urban life and culture and philosophy.

The dance party, of course, is the spectacle, and the giving up of one's self to the DJ is the loss of self to some higher and possibly not deserving entity. Despite what the contemporary sampling of yoga and Zen has told us, there is still some discomfort in this ceding, and perhaps we are not mistaken when we feel it. As if to emphasize this, the music, for all its pedigree, was not particularly danceable--some of the funk samples were perversely short--and I had a good time watching two cute hippie girls making the best of it. Spooky had led us into a pleasant, brainy conundrum, and left us to find our way out (with the inference that we were smart enough to do so). It's an unanswerable question: Once you're aware of mindlessly participating in something predetermined and predigested, how do you proceed? You can turn away from the movie screen and dance anyway (like the hippie girls), or you can stand there like a big snob and feel superior and look stupid. The joke was on us, and though I had no idea how to resolve it, I laughed.

This may or may not be the point of the series Exploding Cinema, which pairs these two impulses--the turning in, and the looking out--with music on the one hand and various forms of film (video projection, experimental cinema, music videos) on the other. Cross-genre work often takes you into uncomfortable territory by exploding (aha!) the assumptions you make about how you pay attention... on the way out, anyway.