The authors discuss what they term “media commedia”: performance works melding comedic performance traditions with new media technologies. They focus on The Roman Forum Project, a series of mixed-reality performance projects they produced whose subject is contemporary American politics and media as seen through the eyes of ancient Romans.

The web site mouchette.org is animated by the persona of Mouchette, an on-line identity created by an anonymous artist. The interview presented here sets out the artist's purposes in creating Mouchette and the understanding of on-line experience underlying the work shown on the site.

The author explores the pioneering ideas and experiments that the Russian musician and artist Mikhail Matyushin (1861–1934) contributed to the theory and practice of synthetic art. Special emphasis is placed on light art, light music and Matyushin's reflections on analogies between visual and performance art and on synesthesia. The article adduces some new facts, taken mainly from Russian sources not readily accessible to Western researchers.

David Hockney has recently hypothesized that some early Renaissance painters employed optical devices such as concave mirrors to project images of a scene or part of a scene onto their supports, which they then traced or painted over. As one of many examples, he has claimed that Hans Memling (ca. 1440–1494) built an optical projector to create his Flower Still Life, specifically when rendering its carpet.

Sprites are fleeting, luminous shapes that shoot into the upper atmosphere during large thunderstorms as lightning simultaneously reaches down to Earth. For at least a century, scientists have attempted to confirm and explain the existence of sprites with visual images and data. The author's series Lightning's Angels supplements the documentation of sprites by exploring the properties of this natural phenomenon through digitally enhanced oil portraits set to music and displayed in a large scale multimedia format, such as at a planetarium.