No matter what you conclude about " Time Share, " the inaugural show at one of the Boston area’s newest (and arguably most ambitious) galleries, the entire Northeast is a richer place for the birth of Art Interactive. In an ample first-floor space that used to house a cable-TV station, as I recall (just off Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square), Art Interactive has committed to the virtually unthinkable: presenting bold, technologically inventive work with little (foreseeable) commercial potential. When I look around at the art put forward by the major commercial and nonprofit venues, I see few offering the untried, let alone the unprecedented. Art Interactive’s first exhibit — of sound and video and multimedia installations whose sophistication outstrips their strangeness — is both daring and deliberate. These people know they’re mavericks, and they intend to be with us a long time.

The subtitle of ÒTime Share,Ó ÒInteractivity and the Perception of Time,Ó describes this frequently whimsical, uniformly heartfelt, and occasionally gripping exhibit. But just what is, or isn’t, Òinteractivity?Ó When I stumbled, unannounced and off hours, into Art Interactive, I mentioned to Emmanuel Lewin, the gallery’s director, that a painter friend of mine insists Rembrandt is interactive — you can’t see a Rembrandt and not get involved. Lewin agreed but reminded me that whereas a lot of places will show Rembrandt, not many would get behind artists like the six who make up Art Interactive’s first show.

At the heart of the idea of interaction are the dynamics of change, and central to Scott Snibbe’s Shadow (2002) is the notion that change is unpredictable yet controllable. An unprepossessing installation to look at, Shadow consists of a video camera at floor level, a light and a projector high above, and a bright, high-tech screen as a wall-sized backdrop. Walk in front of the screen and your shadow appears — and keeps appearing in a loop of instant replays of your own ambulating umbra.

During my most recent visit, both a graduate student of mine who used to have blue hair and a four-year-old poster child for Ritalin could be overheard squealing with delight when they discovered their shadows shadowing them. Their contentment points to the work’s achievement as well as to its shortcoming: though Shadow invites play, it allows for only a mock-puppet kind. After your initial encounter, there’s no surprise to its interactivity, since the feedback mechanism of the video never changes. The angle and timing and location of the shadows aren’t allowed to vary; play with the piece once and you know all the outcomes.

Far slicker and slightly more captivating is an adjacent and similarly proportioned installation, Camille Utterback’s Liquid Time — Tokyo, 2001. At first glance, Liquid Time looks like a big, stationary slide projection of a bustling rush-hour intersection in Japan’s capital. But step on the rug in front of the projection and a segment of the image moves either forward or backward in time — people start rushing toward you or backing away. The inanimate comes to life in fragments, as it were. It’s a clever idea, and it’s genuinely interactive: I found myself trying to stride the carpet at an angle with my legs wide apart to move the video forward and backward simultaneously.

After the first flush of crowd control, though, I found myself thinking that Liquid Time could have delivered much more. What if my interaction with the screen were to create a dramatic outcome rather than just movements across sidewalks and streets? What if instead of an anonymous crowd, I met an actual character? What if a man were thinking of jumping from a bridge or a woman were giving birth — and my movements affected those situations? As it stands, Liquid Time proves a testimony to the artist’s technical skills.

Two installations in the show disavow interaction altogether for the sake of old-fashioned presentation. Andrew Neumann gives new meaning to the phrase Òmotion picture.Ó The artist creates wall mounts on unfinished plywood that are studded with pillbox-sized video cameras and monitors; both cameras and monitors are themselves in perpetual motion, moving back and forth along parallel 18-inch tracks. As you look at Phase Differential (with Sine Wave), you gradually realize that the tiny screen you’ve been staring at that shuttles before you is projecting nothing more than the black wavy line on the plywood as it’s photographed by the shuttling video camera a couple inches below.

In Pan & Scan, Neumann replaces the sine wave with a sequence of letters and symbols that spell out the name of the work twice — half with the letters going in the correct direction and half with the letters going backward. Instead of one miniature monitor, there are two; as they chug along, left to right, right to left, one projects the properly configured letters while the other projects their inverted counterparts.

Neumann’s point isn’t to demonstrate how easy it is to mesmerize us with meaningless projections — at least, that’s not his only point. His interest lies in the nexus of the hypnotic: the luminous little screens, the repetitious shuttle of machines, the ability of the preposterously complex to reveal something simple. That vast, hazy vista behind the black sine waves turns out to be the pattern of the grain in the plywood.

Jeff Talman’s appealing contribution is also non-interactive. The Disturbance of the Discreet Voyeur is a sound recording — atonal, eerie, suggestive of whales — projected from an audiotape that unfortunately fills the entire exhibit space. (Curators remain remarkably lax about letting sound cascade down other artists’ work.) The music has been admitted to the show, I presume, on the strength of an intriguing idea the composer had: to record the sound of air passing through various musical instruments. The Distance of the Discreet Voyeur may be the first musical composition written by, and not for, flute, clarinet, trumpet, and guitar.

Michael Mittelman’s installation Fathers.Surveillance proves active but misses the ÒinterÓ mark. In Mittelman’s ambitious but unrealized piece, you’re invited to sit in a musty upholstered chair. Once that’s occupied, the chair’s seat sets off an audiotape with a voice whose words you can’t make out beyond the other sounds. It also sets off two video projections you can’t see, one on a reel that emanates from behind the chair, another, a delayed broadcast, on a monitor around a nearby corner. If by chance you happen to round that corner after your session in the chair, you may catch a glimpse of yourself on the monitor along with a stationary image related to WW2.

There’s enough going on in this confusion of videotapes and audiotapes and Salvation Army furniture to suggest they relate to personal and profound matters. A train’s chugging forms part of the audiotape; the imagery on the monitor could include an elderly person talking or a pile of corpses. Unfortunately, the elements never align, let alone congeal, sufficiently for you to enjoy an actual experience or even make a coherent connection with the Holocaust. I left feeling as if I’d read every fifth word on a page in an unfamiliar book.

Also included in ÒTime ShareÓ is a series of pleasant, color-drenched photographs by Jane Marsching in which unexpected objects, moths and computer-generated architectural models, people and machines, orbit one another in blue-black outer space. In the wall text that accompanies her work, Marsching writes, ÒI gather together divergent messages from this cosmos and focus them into stories of wonder.Ó Maybe so, but it still looks like Adobe Photoshop to me.