Where and what is the border between film and visual art? Is it true that we see art but watch films? Such issues have been under discussion since Andy Warhol first played with film, though these days the words ‘moving image’ rather than film are used as many films are not made with actual film but with digital equipment. And it is certainly the advent of digital equipment — lighter, cheaper, quicker — that has led many more artists to make moving images part or all of their work. Maybe moving images are just a tool, but what a tool.

The biennial Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) has made a huge global mark through part-funding, and sometimes commissioning, films with its investment fund. Successful examples from the past are Ten Canoes, Look Both Ways, Lucky Miles and The Home Song Stories. For the first time in 2009, the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund has commissioned a visual artist to make a work to be shown during the film festival.

Lynette Wallworth’s experimental approach to the moving image has seen her develop new ways of experiencing the illusions of which it is capable. Her moving image installations are interactive in subtle and complex ways that cross the boundary between the moving image and life as they play on the emotions of the viewer. The AFF’s newly commissioned moving image work by Wallworth, called Duality of Light, will be shown at the Samstag Museum of Art along with a retrospective of other significant and award-winning works she has made over the last seven years: Hold, Invisible by Night, Damavand Mountain and Beautiful Sunset.

And the creative nexus between moving images in cinema and gallery contexts will be explored in the two-day Art & the Moving Image Symposium. Speakers include: Mexican Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, senior curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Laurence Kardish; and Vasif Kortun, the founder of Platform Garanti, Istanbul.

Kortun is also curating Socially Disorganised, an exhibition of videos focusing on humorous urban dissent by international artists Halil Altindere, Fikret Atay, Cheng-Ta (Yu), Hala Elkoussy, Daniel Guzman, Kuang-Yu (Tsui), Minouk Lim, Ahmet Ögüt, Wael Shawky, Nasan Tur and Alexander Ugay, to be shown at the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF).

The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA) is showing Scratch an Aussie by Richard Bell, which uses satirical role reversal to comment on racism in Australia. The show also includes famous Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei’s Fairytale — a documentary about the passage of 1001 Chinese people to Kassel, Germany, for documenta 12 — and CACSA curator Peter McKay’s Road Movies — a local contribution by 15 Adelaide-based artists who have each made a digital video in one week with a basic camera. McKay says, “The idea is to emphasise the immediacy of the medium and cultivate the conditions to construct a coherent yet significantly improvised exhibition.”

ORLAN is perhaps most well known in Australia as being the first artist to use surgery for artistic ends with her surgery performances. In 1998 she launched an international exploration into different standards of beauty, beginning in Mexico with Pre-Columbian civilisation. Having refigured her face through a series of plastic surgeries she hybridizes her new image to the aesthetic values from this other cultures. Working with a digital technician to mingle the real with the virtual, taking the ‘other’ inside under her own skin, she creates digital melds of her face with the stone of the Pre-Columbian sculptures, making self-hybridizations in which the grotesque becomes inseparable from the beautiful. Works in this exhibition are for sale.

On Friday afternoon a woman taking an adult education class at the museum accidentally fell into “The Actor,” causing the tear. Officials at the museum said that since the damage did not occur “in the focal point of the composition,” they expected that the repair would be “unobtrusive,” according to a statement released on Sunday.

The accident recalled another human-canvas run-in involving a Picasso. In 2006 the Las Vegas casino owner Stephen A. Wynn put his elbow through “Le Rêve” (“The Dream”), a 1932 Picasso of the artist’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, leaving a sizable hole that has been so artfully repaired that the untutored eye would never know such a fate had befallen it.

But it is difficult to compare a 1932 Picasso with one painted in 1904-5. The early canvases are more delicate and the oil paint is thinner than the enamel-based kind the artist was known to have used later in his career. And then there is the question of whether there’s only one image involved.

“The Actor” was painted when Picasso was only 23. “He was very poor, and these canvases were expensive,” said John Richardson, the Picasso biographer. He explained that if Picasso made a mistake, he couldn’t afford to throw out the canvas, but rather painted over it. “Nearly all these early canvases have something painted underneath,” Mr. Richardson said.

He added: “There are few major paintings from this period and” — at 4 feet by 6 feet — “this is one of the biggest. It’s very important.” Dealers say a painting of this scale and period could be worth well over $100 million.

It’s an image — a tall, gaunt actor, dressed in a commedia dell’arte costume, leaning out across the footlights — that has often been puzzling to viewers, Mr. Richardson said, adding, “People seem to miss out on the fact that the actor is on a stage, which is unusual.” Also unusual is that the prompter’s hands are visible in the right-hand corner.

Whether those hands are now torn, nobody at the Met is saying. Nor are museum officials talking about how they plan to repair the painting. They did say that since the incident happened only on Friday, it will take time to decide the most prudent and effective treatment available.

David Bull, a Manhattan conservator, has not seen “The Actor” since its tear and therefore would not talk specifically about the painting, but he said there were all kinds of things that could be done nowadays. “We have many more choices of materials than we used to and many new approaches,” he said.

Mr. Bull and several other conservators who have not seen the tear say the next steps depend on many unanswered questions. For starters, is the canvas lined?

“In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s there was a passion for lining, but now whenever possible we try to avoid lining because there is always a chance it could destroy the original canvas or make the surface seem dull or heavy,” Mr. Bull said. “If it’s not lined, it will be easier to repair.”

Some experts also wondered whether the canvas had a depression in it from the woman’s fall, and if the tear was straight or branched. And then there was the issue of whether there is a second painting underneath “The Actor” or on the reverse side. Recent research has revealed that Picasso took an old canvas with a landscape on it, the work of another artist, flipped it over and painted “The Actor.” (He also painted out the original image.)

Like a gifted plastic surgeon, a seasoned restorer has many options these days and a host of materials and instruments at his disposal, even acupuncture needles. They are not used as they would be in Asian medicine, to puncture a surface, or to sew a canvas, but rather are applied from behind to keep a tear flat.

Such needles were used to repair “Le Rêve,” said William Acquavella, the Manhattan dealer who was involved in an attempt to sell that painting on behalf of Mr. Wynn and who has shown “Le Rêve” at his gallery since it was torn. “It’s amazing what can be done these days,” he explained, adding that when they are finished restoring “The Actor,” the tear “will probably only look like a tiny pencil line. If that.”