In November 1999, the Internet toy store eToys.com initi-ated a trademark lawsuit against “net.art” site etoy.com. etoy and other Internet activists responded by launching TOYWAR, a decen-tralized on-line mobilization against eToys, waged on fronts from shopping servers to on-line investors' forums.

In this article, the author de-scribes Color Music, an alternative notation system for musical expres-sion. The system uses colors and shapes-powerful tools of expres-sion-in conjunction with sound to form a new language for musical no-tation. The author briefly describes the history of color/sound relation-ships since the time of Aristotle and discusses the use of color in scores by Alexander Scriabin, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Krzysztof Penderecki, Gyorgy Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen and other contemporary composers who recognized color as a tool of expression for musical no-tation.

The author discusses the life and work of Grigory Gidoni, artist-inventor of the early days of the Soviet Union. Nearly forgotten, Gidoni's works and ideas shed light on the spirit and the artistic and ideological atmosphere of the U.S.S.R. in the decades following the Revolution.

The author experiments with a product-delay algorithm as a means of creating graphic de-signs on a computer. With the product-delay algorithm and a little imagination, it is possible to create a wide variety of artistic patterns, several examples of which are presented here.

The author explores Richard Latto's proposition that art com-municates effectively because art-ists manipulate basic features of form that the human perceptual system has evolved to detect. She offers an empirical test of the correlated proposition-that view-ers of art use these same fea-tures to assess art. The author presents the results of an experi-ment in which both artists and non-artists were asked to discern and draw shapes in patterns de-fined by iterating dots.

The author describes his un-derstanding of the place and pur-pose of his art in the context of our late twentieth century: as an artist, he does not accept a place in the current “death of art” situa-tion. He agrees that abstract art is not self-explanatory although its meaning exists in the collective unconscious. To explain his effort, he has found metaphors in quan-tum physics that enable him to link his artistic process to the dy-namics of progress found in sci-ence rather than to those of re-gression found in the arts.

The author, an interdiscipli-nary artist, discusses his creation of art in a microgravity environ-ment as part of the 1998 NASA Student Reduced Gravity Flight Program. He discusses his three-dimensional “drift paintings” which floated in the air along with his body in microgravity. The au-thor posits that the transcendent quality of the creative process can help keep the human spirit alive during long-term space missions.