There are multiple rooms-as-artworks this week, from an arcadelike space downtown to a gated chamber in Westwood.

5. Alone with the flashiness
Cayetano Ferrer’s Endless Columns, part of his show “Composite Arcade” at Chateau Shatto, is a mirrored room with a column at the center. The column, lit with flashing neon lights, reflects all around you and, if you go in alone, gives you the eerie feeling of being at an arcade or casino before anyone else has arrived. 406 W. Pico Blvd., dwntwn; through Nov. 1. (213) 973-5327, chateaushatto.com.

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4. Blurry basketball
If you stand facing a corner where two of Jesse Fleming’s four screens meet, in the basement of 356 Mission, you’ll be able to see not just two projections at once but also, through the crack between the two, the blurrier backside of a third projection. Each screen that's part of Fleming's “The Halftime Show” shows the same imagery, maybe of crowds as seen on a Jumbotron or kids playing, but sometimes seeing three versions at once makes for perfect viewing, as when the red-headed girl in the white skirt is spinning around on a basketball court. 356 S. Mission Road, Boyle Heights.; through Nov. 2. (323) 609-3162, 356mission.com. 

3. Curtains for an empty room
Right now, two of Uta Barth’s photographs of off-white linen curtains lit by the sun hang in Park View, a space run out of an almost entirely furnitureless apartment. They’re perfect there, where their uncanny cleanness makes as little sense as the emptiness of the domestic space around them. 836 S. Park View Street #8, Westlake; through Nov. 2. (213) 509-3518, parkviewparkview.com. 

2. Before there was CGI
In 1963, computer scientist Kenneth Knowlton, who worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, developed a program for computer-generated animations. He called it BEFLIX, because that was like a corrupted version of “Bell Flicks,” and it allowed for fairly simple operations: Draw straight lines from dots, draw curves, copy region, zoom in on region, etc. Artist Stan VanDerBeek used BEFLIX to make animations that flash and throb, in which words come together like mosaics. Projected large at the Box right now, VanDerBeek's films are commanding even though they're dated, like harbingers of the tech-infused present. 805 Traction Ave., dwntwn; through Oct. 25. (213) 625-1747, theboxla.com.

1. Dark romantics are better in person
Jim Hodges’ work doesn’t photograph well. In pictures, the New York–based artist’s flowers pinned to walls, or spider webs made of silver chains, look sentimental and polished. In person, in the Hammer Museum’s galleries, they’re more raw, and romantic in a dark sort of way — his black-and-white tissue paper rose is something Snow White’s mother definitely should have avoided pricking a finger on. And that gate of chains and charms, with the empty, blue-lit chamber behind it, is creepy like a room in Bluebeard’s castle, if Bluebeard were an icy queen living in New York in the 1980s. 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Wstwd.; through Jan. 18. (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu. 

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