One after another, black-and-white images flash across the screen, covered in text messages written in red. One comes: "hello again this is you favorite fan again just letting u know i am still here and watching u verrry closely."

Followed by the next: "checked under your car lately? gas tank exhaust drive safely now!"

The words and images are creepy and somewhat surreal, but they're not fiction. They represent a reality that local artist Harry Williams and his daughter Kendra lived with for 18 months. From late 2000 to April 2002, not long after Kendra, now 17, and Harry moved to Okemos so Harry could pursue a master's degree in painting at MSU, they were subjected to almost daily harassment via e-mail. At first, they targeted Harry, but soon the e-mails were sent exclusively to Kendra.

In response, Harry created a series of 21 images, called "The Internet Stalker Project," opening this Friday at Spiderhouse Market, 515 E. Grand River Ave. in Lansing. The exhibit will run throughout May.

"I was just trying to mimic the fact that these things come through some kind of media," said Harry, who doesn't usually work with video in his art. "I couldn't paint about it. There is no actual hand, no one does anything to you. If somebody had spray-painted our car or thrown rocks through our window or something, maybe there'd be a different response. But it was always this cool, detached, silent words on a screen that we were seeing, day after day after day."

Initially, Harry said he paid no attention to the messages sent to his MSU e-mail account beginning in fall 2000. By spring 2001, the e-mails became more harassing, Harry said.

In October of that year, the e-mails were going directly to Kendra's AOL account, which Harry said very few people had access to. Detective Robert Clugston headed the investigation by the MSU Police Department and was able to trace the account and reveal its owner, Harry said.

Clugston said the victims knew the person sending the e-mails, and after the name of the account owner was revealed, the e-mails stopped. The whole thing stemmed from a domestic issue, he said, adding that the investigation still is considered open-ended, although no further action has been taken and no charges were brought. Clugston declined to comment further.

Psychology professor Gary Stollak said some might consider it stalking in the legal sense of the word, but each person has a right to determine whether they feel threatened by a certain situation.

"This notion of invasion of privacy is such an interesting issue, whether it's a phone call or U.S. mail, but there's something about the Internet that's not quite the same invasion of privacy as a phone call," Stollak said. "The phone is ringing. An e-mail message I can delete without opening up."

In response to his family's experiences, Harry created the exhibit, completing most of the work for the project in spring 2002, not long after the e-mails stopped.

"This is how I dealt with the anger," Harry said. "It was therapeutic for me."

Harry manipulated colors and distortions before deciding on an image inversion. The result is a set of black-and-white slides with faces that glow an eerie shade of white, similar to horror movie images.

"The creepier I make the images, the less focus there is on the text," Harry said. "The images are my invention. I've taken them, I've manipulated, I've created them. But the texts are in no way my invention, and that's what's really terrifying."

Harry had originally thought about using school photographs of his children, but instead chose to use his sixth-grade class photo.

"I didn't want it to be about me," Kendra said. "That's why I'm glad there's a bunch of random kids that look like, 'Hey, that could be my kid, that could be my kid.'"

Harry said he hopes to accentuate the darkened room to add to the visual effect by hanging children's clothes that belonged to his two daughters. He said the clothes will be arranged in the room so that "you will literally have to almost brush past to get to the monitor," he said. The clothing would work as a muffler of noise.

"What I would like to do is take away people's awareness of their own movement through the space, so it almost becomes surreal," Harry said. "It should be quite visually dynamic."

He said he also would love to place a children's wading pool in a spot in the room that will allow a reflection of the monitor into the water upon entering the exhibit - an effect that will create two images, one of which will disappear the closer a visitor walks toward the monitor, Harry said.

The exhibit was shown as part of the Fresh Materials exhibit at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids earlier this year and now will make its way to Lansing.

Spiderhouse Market owner Todd Belvin said he had just reopened his gallery space in February when Harry had expressed interest in showing his exhibit.

"I like to bring in new, individual artists," Belvin said. "People who are new on the scene, people who may not have had too much gallery experience. And he just really wanted to do it."

Harry said he was surprised that many people in Grand Rapids thought his exhibit was a work of fiction, despite information on the wall next to the video monitor telling otherwise.

"People don't want to talk about it," he said. "They'll say, 'Oh, that must have been frightening,' and change the subject, that kind of thing, as soon as they find out it's real.

"If it's fiction, they can discuss it at length. If it's real, they want to pass a short expression of sympathy and talk about something else."

Harry said he is looking forward to seeing reactions of visitors, especially since several people will be sharing the experience together in the small space.

"Once you're in it, you're within the artwork. You're not just looking at it, it's encompassing you entirely," he said. "You could have seen my piece in Grand Rapids without ever approaching the other people who were looking at it. That won't be a possibility."

He hopes that people take away his message of raising awareness about the issue.

"If everybody just keeps sweeping it under the rug, the next person will always have a problem," he said. "The next person will always face what we did."