As Manny mentioned, this weekend marked the first of five presentations in a series of video and new media art presented by the Video Association of Dallas at Conduit Gallery. The good news: If you missed Saturday’s opening reception at Conduit Gallery, you can still catch the installations, which will be on display this week. More good news: There are four more weekends of receptions, talks and new work.

Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 13 was the star of this week’s show. Barney’s best known for his Cremaster cycle of videos, and, in the pop culture world, his relationship with Bjork. Drawing Restraint 13 is less fantastical, if equally open to interpretation: Barney appears as Gen. Douglas MacArthur, “branding” a series of his own drawings. I missed co-curator Carolyn Sortor‘s talk on the piece, but she provides a helpful overview on her blog. Barney’s site, too, gives more on Drawing Restraint, but doesn’t include this part of the series.

Other highlights:

The Torcito Project. Artist Marcin Romocki transforms photos of faces into percussion pieces by creating bitmaps of them played through the old Mac program Virtual Drummer.

RMB City – A SecondLife City Planning by China Tracy. China Tracy/Cao Fei is creating a development/film/piece in the virtual reality game Second Life. I’m not sure I’d want to live in this world of floating pandas and shooting flames, but an on-line auction going on in London during the exhibit indicates that I may be one of the few.