New York artists Van Neistat, 31, and Casey Neistat, 25, are classic high-spirited, all-American brothers struggling to beat the system and having a blast doing it. These almost-bad boys (Casey had a son at 17; Van was charged with vandalism twice in elementary school, and once again in high school) worked blue-collar jobs and never went to art or film school, but now travel the world (The Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil, the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris), spreading an infectious sense of mischief through their original videos and performance pranks.

On Thursday they make their Honolulu debut at Chinatown nightspot NextDoor as part of The Contemporary Museum's new event series, 2411: art down the hill.

The brothers were thrown into the limelight in 2003 with their two-minute protest video "iPod's Dirty Secret" (see neistat.com), inspired when Casey discovered his iPod battery was dead after 18 months but under warranty for just a year.

Interest in the short spread virally via Friendster.com and after a week, the film had been downloaded upwards of 40,000 times, landing the brothers in the New York Post, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone magazine. The fun continued in fall 2005, when the Neistats shot an advertising campaign for designer Kate Spade and collaborated on the short film "The Challenge" with Kate's husband, Andy Spade, which was broadcast in April 2006 on his brother, David Spade's "ShowBiz Show" on the Comedy Central network.

Speaking in their stylishly chaotic studio in Manhattan's Chinatown, walls lined with hundreds of carefully labeled VHS tapes, the brothers chain-smoked in order to sit still long-enough for this interview. They sat at a small wooden table, similar to one they might have colored on in the second grade.

Q. Is this your first visit to Hawai'i?

Van Neistat: I've never been but always, always wanted to go, ever since I saw the movie "North Shore" — "Here on the North Shore we treat friends mo' bettah."

Q. Do you surf?

Casey Neistat: In the summer we surf, like, once a week here in New York at Rockaway or Montauk, but I'm sure it's nothing like Hawai'i. Growing up in Connecticut, the rich kids all went away to places they surfed in the summers, so it was always an ambition — to be a surfer was a mark of success. One of my first surfing memories: Van got a surfboard at a yard sale and it was sitting in our basement, so one day I talked my Dad into driving me and our younger brother, Dean, to Rhode Island. We didn't have any wax, so Dean brought skateboard grip tape to put on the board. We surfed all day on it — skinned knees, elbows and raw chest, totally bloody.

Q. You're scheduled to present your "Science Experiments" videos and a performance as part of the The Contemporary Museum's 2411 series. Is this similar to what you did in Brazil and Paris?

CN. Yes. Have you ever been to an art talk?

Q. Yes.

CN. Well, we don't do anything like that because that's so boring — what we do is so much more personal.

VN. And unpredictable. In Paris, we did a tap-dance show for everybody, and we did a show in Toronto where we started off by giving door prizes to everyone in the audience. Another time we did one of the "Science Experiments" live — separating hydrogen from oxygen in water and then we blew it up — that's a crowd pleaser, though we never know exactly how big the fireball is going to be.

Q. You have a full beard, Van. That's a lot of facial hair to be playing with fire.

VN. Yeah, well, it comes and goes.

CN. We'll be in any museum that will take us, but storytellers or filmmakers is a more accurate description of what we do than "art." I mean, kids like our work. The perfect juxtaposition was when we did the show at the Colette boutique in Paris — it wasn't just an art crowd, it was a fashion crowd, the cool kids came out. ...

VN. JAY-Z AND BEYONCÉ WERE THERE ...

CN. So the audience like that is so much more receptive to the work because they weren't expecting "art." Then we did shows at the Grand Palais and the Palais de Tokyo that same week also in Paris.

Q. So, you're famous in France, but are you big in Japan?

CN. No, not yet, but we want to try to organize something while we're in Hawai'i.

Q. The content of your videos seem pretty random — what are the signatures of your style?

VN. Some people think the resolution of video is displeasing to the eye. We disagree. We think it's the moving, the camera, so most of our work has a fixed camera with things moving through the frame. The flip side of that is you need lots of cuts — two seconds is long for us.

CN. We make no effort to hide our mistakes or any cheating we do. And all of our movies, no matter how short — eight seconds, whatever — follow a strict three-act format. That's essential to our style.

VN. Neither of us watch TV, but we see 500 movies a year. Our favorites are Quentin Tarantino and other indie movies from the early '90s, '80s mainstream movies from when we were kids, and '70s Hollywood movies. We use iMovie software — the same stuff as soccer moms — to edit our films. So, I'd also say that the biggest contributor to our style is our limitations — our equipment and our resources.

Q. The 2003 iPod movie started the ball rolling for you — what came next?

CN. We did the Directors Series project in 2004. Palm Pictures came out with this series of DVDs called The Directors Series — a compilation of music videos by Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham that we still study today like the Torah — they are so awesome. So we decided to do our own version, very similar packaging, and we reverse- shoplifted into stores with the same barcode so it would scan if someone tried to buy them.

Q. You like to taunt Hollywood. You re-edited "Blue Crush," which, was set and filmed in Hawai'i. Why?

VN: The bulk of surf movies are shot on 16mm and look like crap. "Blue Crush" had a $22 million budget, and the surf footage itself was just amazing. But they had to put in totally lame aspects of the story to sell the movie to nonsurfers, so we cut most of that, all the CGI stuff and put The Pixies music to it in order to make it the 49-minute masterpiece it should have been.

Q. Do you ever get cease-and-desist letters for copyright infringement?

VN. We just got one last week — our first.

Q. What are you looking forward to, besides doing the show while you are in Hawai'i?

VN: I don't know. We're so driven, we don't even look forward to things anymore. We're so focused on the now. When are we even going to Hawai'i?

CN. This weekend?

VN. I know we rented motorcycles because you can't get lost on a motorcycle, but we don't really know what to expect. We're just really excited. We want to surf the local secret spots and hope we won't get killed.

O'ahu-raised Cathay Che is a freelance writer in New York City.

From left, "Goldfish," "Mousetrap" and "$100 Bill" are among the Neistat Brothers' popular films. The brothers, who prefer to be regarded as storytellers or filmmakers, have been traveling the world to exhibit their art.