Nicole Cohen's interactive video installation, "Please Be Seated" at the Getty Center in Brentwood combines an interior decorator's appreciation of historic spaces and furniture design with a "Beam me up, Scotty" brand of interspatial time travel.

The exhibit (which takes its design cue from that strange limbo-esque room that Dave ends up in at the end of "2001: A Space Odyssey") allows visitors to see themselves digitally beamed into lavish interiors and intimate living spaces once frequented by Marie Antoinette and the courtly society of France.

The stars of the show are six abstract re-creations of period chairs. Designed by Cohen to mimic their counterparts in the Getty's permanent collection of French decorative arts, these six stately chairs provide a launching pad for the installation.

As viewers nestle themselves into these re-creations of neo-classical, baroque, rococo and regency furniture, they can look up at strategically placed monitors and see themselves keyholed into the world of Louis XVI. Mon Dieu!

"The staff at the Getty Museum," said Cohen, "were really interested in how I take the present and conceptualize it into the past, how I superimpose different scenarios from contemporary culture into past images."

Born in Falmouth, Mass., in 1970, Cohen considers a canvas or a glowing video monitor as a theatrical stage onto which she can project a confrontation of differing time periods and clashing cultural aesthetics.

"I'm interested in what these preconceived, scripted spaces imply about human behavior, or how people were meant to act in terms of the psychology of the interior design," said Cohen, admiring her digital image seated in Marie Antoinette's "salon du rocher" in the Belvedere Pavilion of the Palace of Versailles. "That clash is an interesting factor in how we differentiate now from the past."

The image on the screen, Cohen explained is actually a complex composite that took months to produce.

"It's like a stage with three component parts," she said. "The first part is the live feed, which involves the visitors to the installation who are picked up on surveillance cameras. The second level is a JPEG of the actual chairs that are in the Getty's collection. The third level is the location settings (which include interiors of the Musée national du chateau de Versailles, the Musée du Louvre, the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris, as well as the Getty's own lavish period rooms)."

The creation of "Please Be Seated," Cohen said, required years of research and preparation, to design and fabricate the chairs, then create the computer wizardry that could make the installation come alive.

"The chairs that were to be worked into the image of the rooms all needed to be fabricated," said Cohen. "We also had to produce multiple shots of each space because there was a strict ban on introducing artificial light. Then they all had to be stitched together in the computer to create a seamless effect."

For the installation at the Getty, Cohen said, "Each monitor has its own camera and computer which creates the interactive element. The final effect is as if you are being virtually beamed into the space and its different reality. My first reaction when I saw the finished installation was that I was in the future looking at the past, rather than being in the present."

There are two points that Cohen feels are particularly important. One is that her exhibit should be observed in a contextual relationship to the nearby period rooms, which contain the actual chairs. The other is that her installation is not meant to be seen as a museum version of a Hollywood costume drama.

"I never had the notion of having an actor costumed as Marie Antoinette enter one of the rooms," she said. "I'm not really interested in that kind of theatrical statement. It's more about the location and space. It's about the public interacting. But," she added with a laugh, "if someone wants to come dressed as Marie Antoinette, they're certainly welcome."

PLEASE BE SEATED: A VIDEO INSTALLATION BY NICOLE COHEN

Where: The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood.

When 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday; through Jan 11.

Cost: Admission is free. $8 for parking. (310) 440-7300. www.getty.edu.