Warning: BitStreams, the Whitney's exhibition of works created by digital means, may induce morning-after qualms in viewers. With its eye candy and upbeat look of modernity, BitStreams is a show that's easy to like, but harder to love or respect.

It leads with two screen-works reinforcing the message that it's safe to take the plunge into digital- age, art waters. Enter right and you're immersed in a luscious looking projection of John Klima's inventive ecosystem, which represents real-time fluctuations in exchange rates, stock indexes and local weather on top of animated images of birds taking wing or a tree sprouting branches. (Commissioned by Zurich Capital Markets, it might have been called econosystem.) Enter left and you find yourself in Jeremy Blake's blandly meditative Station to Station, an abstracted, five-screen animation in an aqua-tinged palette intended to evoke train travel.

Following either of these routes leads one into a show as heavy on painting and sculpture as on installation and projected work. (There's not a computer terminal in sight.) Showcasing the ubiquity of digital production methods to create conventional looking art objects seems to be the curatorial m.o. here. A sample: Jason Salavon's handsome Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1 x 1 is a C-print abstraction for which each of the Titanic's more than 300,000 frames was digitally averaged by its predominant colors. Robert Lazzarini's too-cute skulls is an installation of CAD processed, stretched-out sculptures of human skulls reminiscent of the distorting special effects used to evoke rocket lift-off in film comedy. Jon Haddock's engagingly cartoony views of politically-charged sites like The Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, are drawn in the aerial perspective of Sims, the popular computer game. Inez van Lamsweerde's Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately) is a mural-scaled photo depicting the artist in full pucker and Vinoodh digitally excised from the image. There's so much conceptual variety that the show is an aesthetic leveller; it doesn't allow the works to breathe much or--given its formalist, rather than thematic, installation--to play off one another.

Curator Larry Rinder opens his brief, exhibition-brochure introduction with the over-the-top assertion that "Nothing since the invention of photography has had a greater impact on artistic practice than the emergence of digital technology." (What about World War I, for instance?) Yet there's not really much at stake in such a radical sounding formulation. Consider the fantasy forms of Michael Rees, sculptural assemblages of body parts strung along a spine-like form and given 3-dimensional physicality via CAD-derived rapid prototyping as an object-print-multiple. Rees's whimsical works supply a bit of Surrealist frisson, but they hardly compare to, say, Joseph Beuys's groundbreaking practice of social sculpture, dating from the sixties, which opened the way for art practice as human interaction, or in Beuys' case, even institution building.

BitStreams offers a nice selection of experimental sound (organized by Debra Singer) that includes conceptually based works by the likes of Stephen Vitiello and Marina Rosenfeld. Whatever Rinder says about hybridity, however, none of the works in the show subvert the acquisition-oriented, disciplinary boundaries of museums. (That cross-disciplinary approach was a hallmark of Whitney shows in the '90s.) Where are the smart clothes and interactive design objects or architectural methods that promise radical alterations of our personal and public spaces? Equally important, where are the challenging, non-signature-style output of artists working at sci-tech art-research facilities like the Banff Centre, Carnegie Mellon's STUDIO for Creative Inquiry or MIT's Media Lab?

Although Rinder observes that interactivity is not new, visitors to the exhibition will have no idea that some of this art was made possible by past work by media artists such as Peter d'Agostino, Antonio Muntadas, Chip Lord and Skip Blumberg, or Nancy Burson. (D'Agostino created an immersive VR environment and accompanying installation about the Gulf War; Muntadas has produced works about sites of power such as a corporate board room; Burson pioneered the use of morphing-which she helped invent-for her photo-composites or identity-changing machines.) Two of the best works in BitStreams tip their hat to Lord's and Blumberg's two-decades-old use of surveillance footage for Abscam (Framed): Lutz Bacher's Closed Circuit is an ode to departed art dealer Pat Hearn subtly edited from hundreds of hours of footage collected from a surveillance camera mounted over Hearn's desk and Jordan Crandall's Heatseeking was created for inSITE, a San Diego/Tijuana exhibition about the border, and produced using a number of decidedly erotic surveillance technologies developed for the military.

BitStreams was organized in just six months. (It is the first major Whitney show in memory to lack a catalog.) Max Anderson, the museum's director, has publicly denied that it was produced so quickly in order to compete with the contemporaneous show 010101 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, directed by his Whitney predecessor David Ross. Both museums have gotten plenty of media mileage from that congruence, focused primarily on how to present new digital work to audiences. Terminals in the gallery? Formal screenings? Computers with Internet (and email) connections in the galleries? As usual, the pundits are asking all the wrong questions. Consider these instead: How can art presenters deal with blurred disciplinary boundaries? And how can they tackle the intelligently focused presentation of such work without actually bringing technologists and even scientists--as named collaborators--into museums?