BETA Spaces’ boundary has expanded up to Hart Street, from Jefferson. More than 40 spaces are participating in the art event this year.

After months of planning, preparation, and community gathering, Arts in Bushwick (AiB) will launch the fourth annual Bushwick Exhibition Triangle of Alternative (BETA) Spaces event next Sunday.  BETA Spaces has ballooned from a night of openings at Bushwick’s typical gallery circuit into a one-day-only arts festival featuring nearly forty art spaces.

This year’s selection isn’t just the usual suspects, though there are community discussions at English Kills and Lumenhouse, and an after party at Brooklyn Fire Proof.  New spaces and artist studios are featuring small collaborative and interactive events, making this year’s BETA Spaces a kind of mini-Bushwick Open Studios. The original “triangle,” once bounded on the southeast by Jefferson Street, now extends to Hart.

BETA Spaces is truly emphasizing alternative this year: Marni Kotak transforms her home on Suydam Street into a living work of art in Welcome To My House. I attended Kotak’s refreshing performance, Dinners For You, during Bushwick Open Studios 2008; wearing a costume, she prepared dinner for me and two other strangers while a professional photographer documented our experience. The way Kotak employs AiB’s map listing to attract participants into interactive performance pieces is genius: she is a live-in building owner who truly cares about the neighborhood, and thus straddles the line between genuine community engagement and conceptually rigorous social art.

The event does not diminish the scope of curators’ ambitious projects.  Gulliermo Creus’ Download/Destroy audio and video installation works at the Fortress to Solitude questions the relationship between technology and human nature.  Brooklyn Fire Proof Gallery hosts New Sincerity, self-described as “Post-ironic artworks with a sense of directness, seeking notions of truth.”

BETA Spaces 2010 also features completely virtual art in the form of smartphone apps.  A virtual exhibition, Bushwick Augmented Reality Intervention, curated by Mark Skwarek, was developed on the Layar Reality Browser App, which reveals digital artworks we cannot see all over Bushwick; this same technology was recently used to host an “uninvited DIY exhibition” at New York’s MOMA.  It features artists from all over the world, including Great Firewall and Sunken City by Lily & Honglei of China.  Download the SCVNGR App that will take you on a trek through Morgantown, starting at Bogart and McKibbin Streets.

Another jam-packed AiB event ensures an influx of artists and art lovers to the neighborhood on Sunday, November 14, 12-7pm — so strap on your hiking shoes and charge your smartphone for another scavenger hunt through Bushwick’s overflowing concrete jungle of art.