If anything can be said to be new and different about art these days, it's the predominance of video and film. At last. The moving image has finally taken its rightful place in the art world as an authentic art form. Just ask the curators for The Whitney Biennial. During the last several years, more than half the works selected have been videos.

Luckily, the East End has its ample share of quality-made films and videos created by local artists who have found technological media not only challenging, but also a potent tool for expressing what they could not convey otherwise.

For example, consider the experiences of sculptor Linda Stein, an artist who lived very close to the Twin Towers. On that fateful day of September 11, she found herself and her staff running away from the disaster she thought was a bomb. The event was traumatizing, but it also became a defining moment in her art-she began to make films that mirrored her fear, a fear that did not start with 9/11 but had existed from childhood.

As a child, Stein had had recurring dreams of running away from an unknown enemy, trying to protect herself from an unknown danger. The cycle seemed to repeat itself on 9/11 when Stein found "real life" imposing on her dreams.

Her subsequent video, Running, which juxtaposes scenes from Hitchcock's Psycho, is the creative result of Stein's personal anxieties. It is an evocative metaphor for her fears, thus, the moving image serves the subject particularly well with video's penchant for camera/character movement and editing.

Stein's sculpture also changed as a result of September 11, taking the form of warriors. Her documentary, Body Swapping, is a result of this endeavor, recording people trying on the knights' exterior trappings. A recent creative development is a video about Wonder Woman, who has now become Stein's defender and protector, replacing the knights from the Middle Ages.

Jane Martin's video, Reveal, is also personal and symbolic of the painter's worldview. Yet its ambience does not derive from fear like Stein's, but instead conjures up images that might very well have helped Stein: a visual poem celebrating nature, particularly the ocean and female sensibility. The work also explores the juxtaposition between truth and fantasy, aspects that Stein also examined in Running.

Reveal savors lyricism and rhythms, the video medium communicating these qualities in eloquent ways, ways that Martin is particularly adept at having spent part of her professional life as a filmmaker.

While Stein's and Martin's moving images are psychological and personal, the series, "Artists Make Movies," presents other works that are more politically based. Consider Maria Maciak's documentary, Departed to Damascus, a moving portrait of Iraqi refugees in Syria. (Maciak's Here is No Insects will also be shown, although it is not political. Rather, it recalls Martin's style of visual poetry.)

Photographer Michael Cardacino's has transferred his photographic montage to video portraits of celebrities like Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and Paris Hilton. The use of the moving image not only helps define and delineate political satire, but the images become "the movement of thought itself."

Finally, On the Cusp, directed by printmaker Philippe Cheng and co-produced by Kathy Engle, Toni Ross and Bastienne Schmidt, has its heart and soul anchored in the political climate created by President Obama's candidacy. However, this arresting documentary is really more about the group of local women who express their thoughts about Obama, revealing their own hopes, dreams and life stories in the process.

"Artists Make Movies." The Pollock Krasner House. For details, call 631-324-4929.

Linda Stein and Jane Martin: Friday, Sept. 4 at 7 p.m.