ART REVIEW : Slow Pace Helps One Savor Fullerton Exhibit : Photography: Video grabs the spotlight at “Continuum and the Moment,” a celebration of the camera’s 150th anniversary.

First, you have to slow down. Hide your watch, blank out your next errand, program your mind for contemplation. Or else there’s not much point in going to see “Continuum and the Moment,” an exhibit of videotapes, a video installation and photographs at the Cal State Fullerton Art Gallery (through Dec. 17), celebrating the 150th anniversary of photography.

The works, by Bill Viola, Rita Myers and Hiroshi Sugimoto, are each related in some way to the idea of landscape. (Both Viola and Myers also have pieces in “American Landscape Video: The Electronic Grove,” at Newport Harbor Art Museum through Dec. 31). But these artists are not concerned with landscape-as-travelogue, landscape-as-pretty-pictures or even landscape-as-ecological-resource. Instead, they are interested in landscape as a raw material whose understanding is shaped by human perception and imagination.

Viola, one of the most thoughtful and original artists working in video today, has two tapes in the show. He made “Hatsu Yume” in Japan in 1981. “The Reflecting Pool: Collected Work” contains five shorter pieces made between 1977 and 1981.

“Hatsu Yume” is long--56 minutes--and has many stretches in which not much seems to be happening. The camera often stares fixedly at one image. There is no plot. Some images are lit by the sun and others loom out of the night, but it’s hard to say how much time goes by. People appear and disappear according to their own rhythms, and we never learn much about them.

Weird, huh? Well, yes and no. Weird in terms of conventional movie-making, or even the wide-open realms of video. But not so odd when we try to picture what goes on in our own minds when we recall a particular scene from our lives or when we are dreaming.

The exhibit catalogue essayist, Andrea Liss, quotes Viola on this business of “a mysterious, detached, third point of view (which we call) the ‘mind’s eye.’ We ‘see’ the scene, and ourselves, within it, from some other position, quite often off to the side and slightly above all of the activity. . . . It is the point of view that goes wandering at night, that can fly above mountains and walk through walls, returning safely by morning.”

The video opens with an almost pointillist view of a landscape--all tiny colored dots--that becomes a slow-motion image of foam on a wave that rises and curves inward. Clouds scud by and the pale silhouettes of mountains across the sky take on the insubstantiality of phantoms. Suddenly, it’s night, and the water--now still--is illuminated by lights.

Then we find ourselves in another landscape: Japanese people walk independently through a grove of bamboo, apparently on their way to a large, rather ornate rock formation (later, this rock reappears, reduced in size). The site appears to be a shrine, dotted with little piles of shells or rocks that are probably offerings--human imitations of the order of nature.

The scene shifts to a fishing boat. Illuminated at night, the boat glides on the water. A man on the deck pauses to light a cigarette and look out to glowing lanterns in the distance. This slow-motion section of the tape, in which the flame of the man’s match leaves a brilliant, zigzagging trail in space, suggests the feelings we have sometimes of acute sensory awareness.

The interplay of various rhythms is a major feature of the tape. At one moment, big spools on the ship that hold the fishing filament tumble hypnotically as the thread unwinds. Then, we see the pulsing motions of the glistening tails of dying fish lying on the deck.

Eventually, we find ourselves in a city at night; the camera slows down here instead of speeding up to imitate city rhythms, so the view from a cruising car reveals liquid streams of colored lights. Rainfall on the windshield shatters these lights into streams of brilliant tinsel. A moment later, this view is supplanted--as if in the mind’s eye--by the flickering image of fish moving through water.

Liss says the title of the video (“First Dream” in English) “refers to the Japanese idea that the first dream on the eve of the new year not only foretells coming events but also repeats the history of generations.”

The shrine, with its patient pilgrims and ancient rock formations, recalls this history; so does the pattern of earning one’s livelihood from the sea. Ultimately, the whole tape is a paean to Viola’s four-month experience of Japan, seen as a fulcrum for the mysterious workings of memory.

One marvels at the extraordinary aura of ordinary things newly seen and experienced in “The Reflecting Pool,” part of Viola’s compilation tape.

In this seven-minute piece, a man (Viola) contemplates a pool in the midst of a forest, suddenly jumps in--and remains suspended in space until he vanishes altogether. Before he reappears, the pool undergoes a set of seemingly magical shifts in color and light, which result from Viola’s intercutting within single frames of the tape.

Myers’ room-size installation “The Allure of the Concentric” from 1985--originally part of “American Landscape Video”--is less gripping than “Rift/Rise,” a newer piece that was substituted in the Newport Harbor show.

The viewer enters “Allure” through a metal gate that is left ajar. Landscape imagery plays on six video monitors set on arrangements of rocks on either side of the room. At the far end of the gallery, three tall aluminum mesh “castles” huddle together. In the center of the room, three dead dogwood trees overhang a pool of water.

Myers has written that this piece is “an expression of the mythic desire for ultimate renewal and regeneration.” The heart of the piece is supposed to be the pool itself, which is meant to recall memories of throwing stones into a pond and watching the water shatter the reflection of the sky into “a wave of concentric circles.”

Trouble is, the viewer’s attention seems to be directed away from the pool, toward the changing images of desert, mountain and forest views on the video monitors and toward the puzzling towers. It’s hard to decide what these fanciful constructions might represent.

Nothing about the pool itself is particularly unusual or compelling. Even the dead trees overhead come across as obvious, even rather ponderously literal reminders of the cyclic aspect of nature.

Myers seems to have programmed this piece with such a relentless theoretical approach that she forgot to consider how viewers are likely to react to the physical facts of the installation.

Sugimoto’s black-and-white photographs include works from his “Movie Palace” and “Seascape” series. Each of the darkened old movie house interiors was taken from a balcony-level vantage point with a very slow exposure, which yielded a glowing white rectangle where the film would be.

Presented this way--as gravely symmetrical images frozen in time, without even the hint of a human presence--the interiors take on a curiously “archeological” quality. It is as if Sugimoto has discovered a group of religious sites from some heretofore unknown culture.

Sugimoto also takes an unusual tack in his “Seascapes.” According to the labels, each photograph was taken of a different body of water. The irony is that--except for slightly different atmospheric conditions--they all look very similar, with water and sky each taking up exactly half of the image.

Looking at some of the world’s seas in this way brings to mind the differences among political, scientific and purely experiential ways of looking at the same thing. In one view, the Mediterranean Sea is something different from the North Atlantic; in another, all huge saline bodies of water are remarkably alike.

“Continuum and the Moment” continues through Dec. 17 at the Cal State Fullerton Art Gallery, 800 State College Blvd., Fullerton. Hours: noon to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 2 to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission: free. Information: (714) 772-3262.