This year’s New Jersey Fine Arts Annual, at the Montclair Art Museum through July, is devoted to artists who somehow engage the digitization of the arts in their work. That means cell-phone camera shots and videos, of course, and other miniaturized technologies that are not necessarily perfect for museum viewing. The show is not limited to tiny glowing screens by any means, but there is hardly an object here that doesn’t contemplate what their proliferation has done to our visual universe.

Take, for example, Matthew Wilson’s portrait of “Mad Men” character Don Draper, “Perceptions of Success #4,” done by tracing ink marks over a faint digital printout, which was itself transferred from a screenshot to computer paper.

The famous “Mad Men” credit reel, showing a silhouette of Draper falling past Modernist skyscrapers covered in advertising images, has become an iconic contemporary symbol of economic/psychological distress, but it has a Post-Modern fine arts pedigree. It’s based on Robert Longo’s famous “Falling Yuppies” series of charcoal drawings from the 1980s, a medium every bit as old or older than ink.

“Perceptions of Success #4” is supposed to engage contemporary American definitions of masculinity (“#3” is a portrait of Jack Nicholson from “Mars Attacks”), but it’s also a hand reaching out of the grave, so to speak, of old media to grasp the meaning of the new: It’s a drawing made of tiny hyphen-like lines laid over an originally digital and pixelated image. Wilson, who lives in Dunellen, is transforming labor-saving computerization into labor-intensive hand work — if you can’t see the David vs. Goliath defiance in that, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening to labor during the recent economic collapse.

The show is titled “New Media: New Forms,” and, in all, it includes 13 artists who live and work in New Jersey, many of them familiar from regional shows and alternative galleries. Curated by Alexandra Schwartz, curator of contemporary art at Montclair, and Kelly Baum, the Haskell curator of modern and contemporary art at Princeton University, with the help of Montclair curatorial assistant Kimberly Fisher, the exhibit often strikes a mediating stance between new media and traditional art practice — at least, when it isn’t doing just the opposite.

Fine art video work is often conceptual and highly formal — there’s such a huge commercial industry in producing narrative video that any artist is sorely tempted to turn the screen into a light show, just to burst expectations. Gregg Biermann of Hackensack does that with “Labyrinthine,” a barbershop-mirrors kaleidoscope of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” in which scenes open up like an infinity of boxes within boxes, transforming the screen into a vibrating strobe.

On the other hand, video hasn’t just replaced drawing, it’s sort of replaced real life. So Princeton’s Efrat Kedem has set up two surveillance cameras pointed out Montclair Museum windows, one of them right next to the gallery, and runs a continuous stream of images that bring the outdoors in on two monitors.

Clever videographer Andrew Demirjian of Palisades Park has set up an interactive screen with a DJ’s soundboard that controls the imagery: Bar graph columns that track the stock prices of music companies. As you spin the platter or twirl the knobs, the bar graphs grow or shrink to electronic music you control, a synaesthetic effect that may well reproduce the way hedge funders see themselves. (Demirjian had technical support from Adam Rokshar and Brian Gruber at Harvestworks.) The music made, of course, is only as pretty as the viewer is talented, but it’s the illusion of purposive control that is so creepy.

Joan Pamboukes, who teaches at the New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts in Summit, is showing “Mint Sky,” a seemingly blank digital C-print taken from the back ground of “Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas,” part of her series focusing on the backgrounds and landscapes of video games and, by implication, the artists who make them. Where Pamboukes extracts images that look like fine art from video games, Keith Kostelny of Ewing videotapes game screens and then inserts quotes from Karl Marx as they scroll by; at the opening, Kostelny gave away T-shirts printed with a photo of Marx wearing SuperMario’s cap (the monogram works for both characters). Kostelny transforms the repetitive action of Shigeru Miyamoto’s enormously popular games — jumping to collect coins being almost as frequent as hitting another character in front of you — into a metaphor for post-industrial economic life. And he titles it “Kill Yr Boss.”

Video portrait

The correspondence between fine art and print media was fairly direct — they both dealt in still images, for one thing. But movies, with their single-point perspective and theatrical passivity (not to mention their penchant for slowing down or speeding up time) are more like thoughts than objects. In a way, Liselot Van Der Heijden, who teaches art and art history at the College of New Jersey, has the most successful blend of fine art and video here in “Les Uns et Les Autres,” a three-channel video featuring one of her students.

A screen is set up in the middle of the gallery, each side showing the projected image of the student, one side facing the viewer, the other showing the back of her head. It’s a video, but the student takes care to move as little as possible, like the subject of a Vito Acconci video portrait, so it really does mimic the affect of, say, a photographic portrait by Avedon. On the third screen, which hangs on the wall of the gallery, we see her trying to hold still again, but this time, she’s standing in Zucotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, surrounded by jostling people.

The individual and the crowd, subject and symbol, inside and outside: “Les Uns et Les Autres” uses video to play with all these aspects of contemporary experience. And yet there is a still focus on one person, who imaginatively stands for everyone else, at its center — that is probably the best definition of what contemporary art should be, a last refuge for the individual in our electronically leveled world.

New Jersey Fine Arts Annual 2012 — New Media: New Forms

Where: Montclair Art Museum, 3 South Mountain Ave., Montclair

When: Through July 22. Open noon-5 p.m. Wednesdays to Sundays

How much: $12; $10 for seniors and students; children younger than 12 admitted free. Call (973) 746-5555 or visit montclair-art.com.