Even though it flickers on a building facade at Seventh Street and Congress Avenue, Miranda Lichtenstein's video "Danse Serpentine (Doubled and Refracted)" might be easy to overlook.

Since it was renovated in 2010, the Jones Center — now a part of AMOA-Arthouse, the merger of Austin Museum of Art and contemporary arts center, Arthouse — has used the movie screen-sized window on its second story as a nightly art video venue with films rear-projected for all passers-by to see.

Lichtenstein's video, created in 2010, is a many-layered homage to progenitors of avant-garde art — an homage that's neatly packed into 50 seconds of continuously looping, flickering film.

Lichtenstein uses one of the earliest sequences of film ever made, an 1896 film by the Lumière brothers of "Danse Serpentine" by dance artist Loie Fuller. August and Louis Lumière were some of the earliest filmmakers and they patented a number of moving film processes. (And yes, their surname Lumière — which means "light" — is their real name.)

The American-born dancer Fuller was herself a creative pioneer, a proponent of the free dance techniques later made famous by Isadora Duncan. Fuller also experimented with theatrical lighting, particularly colored lighting, which she used to dramatically augment her sweeping silk costumes. As a regular performer at Paris' Folies Bergère in the 1890s, Fuller and her natural, sensuous, fluid style became emblematic of the then-radical Art Nouveau movement.

Fuller's "Danse Serpentine" used the popular skirt dancer movements of the time, with performers employing their long skirts and sleeves to make exaggerated motions. Coupled with Fuller's early colored lighting, "Danse Serpentine" was downright psychedelic for its time.

In their film version of Fuller's dance, the Lumière brothers hand colored every frame to achieve a similar effect of the lighting. And with such an exotic new dance form seen in the mind-bending new form of the moving image, the film had a profound influence on artists of the time, including Pablo Picasso.

With her video, Lichtenstein inserts herself into the Lumière-Fuller collaboration, adding 21st-century technological twists. She shot two simultaneous projections of the film, one a mirror image of the other. Her "Danse Serpentine" is then, as the title indicates, duplicated and refracted — a digital duet of the original film now made even more surreal.

As it flickers over Congress Avenue, "Danse Serpentine (Doubled and Refracted)" is a compact, charming visual tribute to the artistic trailblazers of a previous time.

Contact Jeanne Claire van Ryzin at 445-3699