Not too long ago, a critic could argue that in the art world, geography is destiny. While there are have always been artists who worked in isolation, artists more commonly work in geographically affiliated schools or communities. Identifying artists by their location has proved to be a convenient shorthand for talking about aesthetics, giving critics a literal map for how the art world changes over time.

Baltimore vs. the World, the first exhibition at the Current Space’s new gallery on Howard Street, was conceived several years ago as a show that would explore whether there is something distinctive about Baltimore video. Curators Michael Benevento, Hans Petrich, and Monique Crabb spent hundreds of hours collecting and viewing contemporary videos—mostly experimental work, along with more traditional documentaries, animated pieces, and music videos. Eventually, they whittled the show down to 40 pieces that would take more than four hours to view if watched in sequence.

The show, however, ends up not trying to make a case for the geographical specificity of Baltimore video. Instead, The World serves as a guide to contemporary video, which appears torn between appealing to its roots in the specificity of the medium and its technologically enhanced capacity to be almost anything in the realm of moving images.

On one end of the spectrum, which could be called works that are indebted to video’s status as a distinct medium, are pieces such as Karin Hofko’s “Reception” (2005), in which a figure dressed in a bunny suit moves an antenna around a room. Like many early video pieces, the work is based on a joke—the antennae, of course, are rabbit ears, and the quality of the video changes as the bunny moves around the black-and-white, sparsely decorated living room—but the piece reads more as nostalgia for a lost art form than simple joke.

In a similar vein, Adrian Lohmüller uses the latest in video and sound technology to record the most unpleasant of experiences: a trip to the dentist. While “Pollen and Pearls” could not have been made 30 years ago, its obsession with the representation of the body is reminiscent of early video works by Nam June Paik. In a similarly uneasy piece, Matt Porterfield turns an interview with a prisoner into a video that probes his body instead, as if his tattooed skin could reveal the truth about why he’s serving a 35-year sentence.

Most of The World’s videos, though, lie at the other end of the spectrum, some of which seem so far removed from video’s historical origins that it might be better calling them something else entirely. For example, the video mash-up, a live action and animation hybrid that encourages artists to overdose on imagery, shows up repeatedly. Here, the ties between Baltimore and the world are more interesting, as local pieces—including Joel Fernando’s music video for Future Islands (“The Happiness of Being Twice”) and the web video/performance group Showbeast’s episode “Nose Raptor”—can be compared to works by New Orleans-based artist Dave Greber’s “Carnival Picaresque,” which uses similar techniques in a narrative film.