What there is to see is in part a lovely bit of filmic choreography, made up of long, graceful pans across a flat lowland landscape-the middle of nowhere under a gray, featureless sky, plains in various dull shades of green flying out toward the horizon on all sides, the negligible skyline of a small town in the far distance-sly zooms that direct your attention to this or that detail, quick glimpses of people and objects and actions that later take center stage with surprising force.

But because the center of the scene is two sheared halves of a bus lying side-up on the road with an endless line of cars caught behind it, "Refraction" is not just about choreography, but about disaster and our perception of it. The camera's movement over the details of the scene-people who have gotten out of their cars to look, emergency workers running here and there, pigs grubbing in a nearby sty-is as restless as it is bossy: showing you where to look, and also seeming to search for something.

It might be searching for the accident's victims, which are, you come to realize, not there. You realize this faster if you bother to read the installation's wall text, although it would be, in retrospect, a fine thing to discover the film's ironic heart on your own, to be hunting in among the rubberneckers, the emergency workers, the pigs, a herd of sheep and goats-not quite knowing what you're looking for, then realizing what it is, and that it's not there, that the scene lacks what gives it its de facto focus.

I don't know what you might learn if you weren't apprised of the work's conceit before you saw it; you might have the pleasure of discovering whether this absence registers as a disappointment or a relief. Perhaps you might discover something of your own bloodthirstiness. But as interesting as it would be to approach the work in such a state of innocence, the surprise of the victims' absence is not what "Refraction" is about.

Without bodies, "Refraction" becomes an odd and smart study of human busyness. Activities here are carried out with a kind of self-importance that's both humorous (because it's all so serious) and unsettling (because it's all so meaningless and detached). People in hazmat suits turning over bits of garbage with tweezers and putting them in bags. Two people moving a metal box from here to there; then moving it somewhere else. Some emergency workers pulling themselves through the window of the upended bus and then slamming it shut with the great urgency of little boys entering a fort of their own devising. Without gore, it's all a game, with rules we don't yet understand, played by self-absorbed people who haven't noticed that no one else is participating. In the midst of this cold pantomime, it's very nearly high comedy when the herd rampages through the scene of the accident, moving with such direction and intensity that one of the animals runs over another's back--and no one on the road seems to notice them, or care.

On the other hand, it's rather chilling when a group of bystanders all turn and walk away at once--whatever they've seen is over, or else too grim to look at any longer. Not knowing what's happening protects you, but also leaves you as restless and unsatisfied as the camera, and eventually you notice not only that the video is silent, but also that the silence is rather cruelly withholding. At one point, two men grasp each other by the face in a gesture that could be either threatening or embarrassingly intimate, but before you can get any purchase on what's happened, or what it might mean, the greedy, indifferent camera moves silently on.

Aeronout Mik's "Refraction" is on view at the New Museum until September 10.

Emily Hall is the former arts editor of The Stranger. Her critical work has appeared in Artforum, the New York Times Book Review, dwell, American Book Review, and the zine RedHeaded StepChild.