Those who have experienced Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, or appreciated a "schizophrenic" painting by surrealist Salvador Dalí, will be open to the strategies that New York-based artist Tony Oursler deploys in "Little Worlds."

The show features three sets of work: the multimedia totems of "Anomalous Bodies, Resonant Dust, Worms" (2007), a recent series of video-enhanced miniatures that lends the show its name, and various 2-D works that freeze the televisual energies through acrylic and photo collage.

Where Disney’s imagineers literally work with smoke and mirrors, and Dalí’s paintings were meant to trigger altered perceptual states, Oursler works in a self-sufficient hybrid space that draws on and extends both approaches.

The first thing visitors will notice is the chatter coming from various configurations of projectors and speakers, creating the ambience of a cocktail party attended by hallucinations. The "Anomalous Bodies" are smooth, organic forms of fiberglass that evoke knots, branches of coral and amoebas. Their skins are projected collages of human eyes, mouths and flesh combined with footage of star-bursts, swirling water and abstract fields of moving color.

With giant eyes blinking out of sync, orbiting slowly while male and female mouths speak from inverted positions, these digital gods and golems come from way across that uncanny valley that separates humans and puppies from ventriloquist dummies, robots and zombies. The strangeness of these entities is probably mitigated by the visibility of the equipment from which they are generated — projectors and speakers, integrated with tripods and cabling, should be treated as key components of each work.

And yet the scale of these remixed facial features remains more cute than horrific, drawing references to the work of Taka­shi Mura­kami and the trend of making terrible things adorable. That’s thanks to the crazy magic of Japa­nese "kawaii" (cute) power. Even the figures’ constant mumbled narratives of self-chastisement, blurted challenges and pointed non sequiturs such as "Let’s see if we can get out of here in one piece" (spoken by a double-eyed, double-mouthed pretzel) are strangely charming.

Their fragmented, contradictory and conflicted advice, coupled with multiplied sense organs (no ears or noses though!) is oddly relatable if not outright familiar. They sound — and, by extension, look — like the kinds of narratives that we all have running in our heads.

Through these characters, Oursler demonstrates an alternative take on the basic strategy of projecting a world. Instead of evoking psychological states through individual "figures," he samples and grafts found sculptures and customized surfaces (crystals, tourist junk, thrift-store baubles, ceramic shapes and casts of other sculptures) into landscapes onto which he projects different elements: little looping vignettes of text, tiny figures, people gesturing, grimacing faces, explosions and animated textures.

All of these works benefit from being considered from various angles, but the tiny landscape series clearly represents the optical illusions and ambiguous visions that characterize surrealism. Profiles and silhouettes emerge and vanish as one walks around these small pieces, turning them from external to internal portraits brought to life by the projected fragments of narrative.

Bring a sheet of paper to truly appreciate the effect Oursler has achieved with the smaller works. It takes months of design to create a two-dimensional image that aligns with the nooks, crannies, surfaces and topologies of the sculptures. The results are 3-D interactions as the surfaces reference each other — a figure looks up to read some text, another reacts to an explosion … and the soundtrack of this mysterious little play whispers from the projector’s tiny speakers.

The visitor won’t necessarily "get the point" of the sound, as it is always a challenge to position oneself in such a way that the audible and the visible can be comfortably integrated. But this is intentional: Each of Oursler’s pieces (even the 2-D works that trade the live motion of video for the frozen momentum of brush strokes) is a psychological portrait open for interpretation; distortion, fragmentation, sampling, repetition and disconnection are all features of our dreams.

Our contemporary media landscape embodies all of these characteristics, but Oursler successfully uses familiar techniques and configurations to encourage us to look inward instead of outward. The transition from one to the other is not driven by the cas­ual entertainment of a fun-house mirror, but a kind of hands-free interactivity based on precisely designed experiments in perception.