The most seductive and outrageous video is Jill Magid’s Lobby (1999), in which you first see passers-by in the domed entrance to MIT transfixed by whatever they’re looking at on a video monitor overhead. The camera moves from the faces of the staring, bemused, and apparently embarrassed students to the monitor above their heads. On the black-and-white screen you see a shifting close-up, but of what? After a few confusing seconds, you realize you’re watching a lens as it travels the contours of a woman’s body. Only intermittently does the perspective allow you to identify a body part, but then there’s no doubt about what’s on screen. As another camera returns your focus to the onlookers, you become aware that one of the bystanders isn’t just looking — she’s moving a hand-held device around under her loose clothing. It’s the camera that’s projecting her flesh onto the public monitor. With methodical seriousness, Magid slides the miniature video camera down her legs and up her shirt unnoticed by the people standing next to her. The artist is both fully exposed and fully clothed, simultaneously ogled and ignored, viewer and viewed. It’s delightfully seditious, in its way a groundbreaking commentary on the line that divides the virtual and the real. When she’s through with her surreptitious exhibition, Magid calmly packs her camera into the bag at her feet, slings it over her shoulder, and walks away.

“Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art” | Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 415 South St, Waltham | through December 17