Agoal of sonification research is the intuitive audio representation of complex, multidimensional data. The authors present two facets of this research that may provide insight into the creative process. First, they discuss aspects of categorical perception in nonverbal auditory scene analysis and propose that these characteristics are simplified models of creative engagement with sound. Second, they describe the use of sonified data in musical compositions by each of the authors and observe aspects of the creative process in the purely aesthetic use of sonified statistical data.

The inevitable realization in scientific circles that the reality of the imagined has an equivalent epistemological significance to the material raises fascinating questions, as it invites a skeptical reconsideration of the essential basis of knowledge.

15 seconds of fame is an interactive installation that every 15 seconds generates a new pop-art portrait of a randomly selected viewer. The installation was inspired by Andy Warhol's ironical statement that “in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.” The installation detects human faces and crops them from the wide-angle view of people standing before the installation. Pop-art portraits are then generated by applying randomly selected filters to a randomly chosen face from the audience.

The SMSMS project is a computer-based interactive installation that derives from the author's previous work, Computer sigillati, in which 200 machines have been programmed to produce an endless flow of random images and left to work indefinitely without being connected to a monitor. In SMSMS, one of the Computer sigillati programs is employed to create images that are visible and can be modified by the public using cell phones.

One year after the 1967 Summer of Love and at a time of considerable political unrest throughout the United States and Europe, Cybernetic Serendipity—The Computer and the Arts opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London to much critical and popular acclaim. This paper outlines the conceptual framework of this seminal exhibition and looks at some of the accompanying press reception in order to address a key question: how media art deals with its own historicity and the underlying socioeconomic forces that render it possible.

Uncomfortable Proximity is a critical web hack of the Tate Gallery's web site, created by Graham Harwood, a member of the Mongrel collective. Commissioned by Tate National Programmes, it mirrors the Tate's own web site, but offers new images and ideas, collaged from Harwood's own experiences, his readings of Tate works and publicity materials and his interest in the Tate Britain site. A related critical text by Matthew Fuller provides wider cultural context.

In this article, the author discusses her virtual reality installation The Parallel Dimension and goes on to explore the loss of identity experienced when a viewer is confronted with VR. She suggests that the dislocations caused by this experience may require us to formulate a more fluid and multivalent concept of the self.