R eady or not, it is time for the first art festival of 2004. Reed Arts Week turns 15 this year. Organizers Becky Weisman and Sonya Masinovsky selected the theme interaction for this year's festival, which features some of Portland's most engaging artists, legendary rapper and "Mr. Edutainment" KRS-ONE, plus a few holdovers from last year's TBA Fest and Core Sample.

RAW kicked off on Wednesday with American/Girl a performance by damali ayo created in response to Whitfield Lovell's mundane sharecropper installation Whispers on the Walls, at Coolley Gallery. Since this paper comes out on Thursday, that event is behind us, but her art installation big eyed street smarts runs through March 14 in the Reed student library.

Thursday afternoon Lee Krist, who is responsible for one of Core Sample's most memorable installations, presents a screening of his film works. Krist is a die-hard analog film nut who hand-processes and cranks his films on antique projectors.

Afterwards, the hiphop portion of RAW goes into effect with a deconstruction of rap music by KRS-ONE, and continues the next day with an afternoon graf battle, and a performance by Bill "Don't call me Crutchmaster" Shannon, whose amazing breakdance and skate-inspired choreography blew everybody's minds at TBA Fest. After that, there's an MC Battle in the student union co-sponsored by Reed's hip-hop collective.

On Saturday, the entire Reed campus is transformed into a make-shift gallery that has student artwork hanging in almost every building. In the Vollum Lounge, the Modern Zoo returns with Disposable, an exhibition featuring six local artists. Each was given reams of diaper fabric and asked to make sculptures and installations with it. Some great artists are involved, including Bruce Conkle, TJ Norris, and Aili Schmeltz.

Red76 just returned from a rock-star tour of Eastern Europe and will be speaking about their experiences as a traveling art collective on Saturday. Meanwhile, the industrious Dave Eckard will be reprising Scribe, his roving sculptural performance in which he hauls around a handmade, mark-making rickshaw.

Finally, things wind down in darkened rooms with projected images on Sunday. Video artist MK Guth screens her recent explorations into the mythology of postmodern superheroes, and the Lecture Series pops up with Three Lectures and a Funeral. CHAS BOWIE