For Vancouver 2010, the seven-week Cultural Olympiad is so widespread and pervasive that it's possible to come to the Olympics, and spend 17 days on art and music and miss all the athletics. And even then, you still wouldn't be able to absorb it all.

For most Olympic visitors, the main point of contact to the Cultural Olympiad is music. There are concerts day and night at stages downtown, at the medals plazas, at Granville Island, in Richmond and up in Whistler. In a single week, I've seen full sets by Wilco, Nelly Furtado, Barenaked Ladies, Fiest, Stars and Kathleen Edwards. And that's just the rock and roll. There are jazz and classical and "world music" performances going on all over Vancouver every night.

Wandering around the city, you're bound to run into the signs posted at various art galleries with the C.O. logo. Included in the $17 million VANOC budgeted for the arts (sponsors kicked in another $12m) are commissioned pieces and installations. Like one at the Five Sixty Gallery on Seymour Street, a collaboration between American jazz trombonist and MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient George Lewis and local painter Eric Metcalfe. Ikons is a series of colorfully-painted five-foot tall sculptures equipped with motion sensors; when visitors come close, each plays sounds. The music, and whether it is or not, is determined by how many people are in the installation and where they're standing.

Some of the larger experimental art pieces are housed in collections. During the first week of the Olympics, there were three separate locations for CODE (or, "Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition"). CODE-1 was at the Great Northern Campus, a few blocks from the Vancouver athletes' village. Ken Rinaldo's Paparazzi Bots were there, three artificially intelligent creatures who swarm around selected members of the audience and shoot flash pictures. One of the other more popular installations was Ghettoblaster by James Phillips, a wall of boom boxes -- LED lights blinking in red and green and amber -- that produces a wall of noise. When one gets closer, however, each is playing a monologue told by somebody from a different part of the world, all about growing up in the 1980's.

The boomboxes also speak different languages, which match the specific markings of the devices. And ironically enough, the audio content is fed through iPods.

Interactive modern art isn't for everybody, but in the 18-year history of Cultural Olympiads, the main art museum in the host city always has one big slam-bang popular exhibition. The Vancouver ArtGallery in the heart of downtown (featuring a pretty pink wrapping by Taiwanese textile artist Michael Lin) is hosting the 18 surviving sheets of Leonardo da Vinci's revolutionary Anatomical Manuscript 'A', presented together for the first time in history. And because it was free, the line stretched for three blocks and two hours.

Me, I'd seen them all in anatomy class. I spent most of my time on the third floor, in the wide-ranging "Visions of British Columbia: A Landscape Manual" exhibit. The Vancouver ArtGallery holds the world's largest collection of works by Emily Carr, the Canadian artist whose expressionist representations of indigenous villages became historical documents. (And as an unmarried woman and solo traveler venturing into unknown territory with paint and canvases in the 1910's, she was an incredibly brave human being.)

All of Carr's paintings, save for ten, are out on a traveling show across Canada, so most of this VANOC-sponsored exhibition is made up of the work of her artistic sons, daughters and distant cousins. There were many paintings and photographs by immigrants and aboriginal artists, almost all of which seem defensive, even reactionary -- capturing the desire to be recorded, counted, respected and represented. Much of the Caucasian-created art dealt with different concerns.

Althea Thauberger's not afraid to die takes place in an cramped, enclosed black-curtained theater. In the seven-minute video loop, a pretty white girl in a polyester overcoat sits in the forest, surrounded by the sounds of birds and other animals. The camera doesn't move. She takes an individually-wrapped granola bar and a juice box from her nylon backpack and eats them. Over the course of the film, different emotions flash over her face: a contented smile that quickly fades into worry and fear, then back again. She's waiting for something that never comes, and whether it's death by starvation or a transcendent natural experience, we'll never know.

It's a slightly disturbing experience, but certainly not as much as Rodney Graham's Edge of a Wood, another immersive experience. One enters through a small door into a large black room, where there are two giant screens. At first, it is completely dark, and accidental bumping with fellow museumgoers is unavoidable. Then the presentation begins.

There's the sound of a distant helicopter, and it comes closer and closer. Within minutes, the noise is so deafening -- easily over 100 decibels -- that people scramble for their cell phones to make flashlights to just get out, escape, flee the installation. On the screens, searchlights illuminate the boundary of a line of enormous pine trees. The lights circle around and around, the size of the forest too big to capture in one circle of illumination. Finally, the light and sound fades as the helicopter retreats... Nature 1, Humans 0.

Both of these films do something that Carr's paintings did a century ago, and explain the experience of white settlers in British Columbia in ways that words or music can't. The relationship with nature in a young and mostly-uncharted land like Canada is complex, as is the relationship with the peoples that know a lot more about making peace with it. There's land and too much of it to ever tame. Whistler didn't even exist two generations ago.

Granville Island, under the bridge across from the heart of the city, is where Emily Carr's namesake art and design college is located (also the home of CODE-2). There are art galleries and studio spaces in every block, and these days it's also where the < AHREF=http://placefranco2010.ca/>Place de la Francophonie hosts exhibitions of Quebecois culture and music. Every night, Circus West (a sort of Cirque de Soleil for local kids) puts on a performance for hundreds of people. We all had to crane our necks upward; a young female acrobat hung suspended from a series of ropes, hanging suspended 75 meters off the ground, nearly reaching the bridge overhead.

The Cultural Olympiad at Vancouver 2010 consists of over 600 performances, at over 60 venues and take place over 60 days (including the upcoming Paralympic Winter Games, which get underway in two weeks). The old Baron would be very proud indeed.