What a season.

This fall -- as my inbox filled with virus-ridden spam, and my mailbox with letters that may or may not carry a deadly disease -- it seemed like the only way to avoid a vicious infection was to get myself off the grid, in real life and virtually, by moving to a remote location and refusing to accept mail, and by unplugging my network connection. Maybe I'd keep my phone, but only for emergencies.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas, author of the classic on contamination and culture, Purity and Danger, would have had a field day with the implications of these threats to personal security, the effectiveness of virus-scanning software, the inviolability of the US post. Ironically, the same technologies--the post, the phone, email, and the Web--that make it easy to connect with each other are also painfully vulnerable to intrusion, infection, and mayhem.

Alan Sondheim and Azure Carter, two digital artists working in Miami, explore this irony in a series of Web art fragments that represent anthrax as a suggestive site of cultural production. The project, "Sex/Anthrax/Mathesis," is a CD consisting of some 70 digital files of images, movies, and text unified by a concern with sexuality and contamination as refracted through the present threat of death by post.

I initially became interested in Sondheim's work because I am subscribed to several net art lists to which he posts frequently. These posts typically consist of text fragments with a strong sexual subtext; more often than not, I had deleted them immediately, disliking the way they seemed to disrupt what I believed to be the purpose of these lists: conversations among practitioners. While often interesting and moving, Sondheim's posts seemed to exploit the fact that he had a direct route to a whole list's worth of unprotected inboxes. Other Web artists, like Kenji Siratori and Mez, also use email as a performance space, to similar effect: spam as performance art.

Yet, the more I deleted these posts, the more I began to reflect on why I was not reading or otherwise responding to them. As I dug deeper, I began to understand that the posts were part of a larger body of work. Indeed, Sondheim has a long career as a teacher and practitioner of net art. So I asked him to send me a CD. A few days later, "Sex/Anthrax/Mathesis" arrived in the mail. Sondheim was now in my mailbox, which has no delete key. As I inserted the CD into my drive, I wasn't at all sure what to expect.

Like a lot of contemporary art, "Sex/Anthrax" cleverly invites you to underestimate it. The videos are grainy, poorly lit, and sloppy in the cuts; the soundtrack includes tinny tracks that reminded me of skating rinks; and the graphic elements in the videos are not particularly stunning although they are sometimes clever. (For instance, Carter's crotch is occasionally overlaid with what appears to be cheap clip art of a yellow lightbulb.) Nevertheless, "Sex/Anthrax" could hardly be called amateurish, for it is quite rich so long as you are not offended by explicit and disturbing (if not exactly violent) sexual imagery and language.

Also like a lot of contemporary art, "Sex/Anthrax" aims to unsettle the viewer's complacency, in this case about pornography, sexuality, infection by anthrax, and the spectre of uncontrollability that these things conjure up. (Annoyingly, the piece does assume that the viewer is complacent to begin with.) There's a wonderfully creepy shot, for instance, of a fat centipede scuttling across the linoleum, and the heavily manipulated images of palm trees suggest that even the plant life has run amok. The X and Y axes that frame many of these images (the business of "mathesis" or abstraction to which the title alludes) only heighten the impression of decadence. Everything is ripe to the point of rotten.