ANCE KINZ bends over a small pile of electronic equipment, punches a few buttons and stands back as a long, rectangular television monitor on the wall fills with color. Mr. Kinz, director of the Feigen Contemporary gallery in Manhattan, is showing a visitor work by one of his artists, Jeremy Blake. As Mr. Blake's pieces swirl into focus, the screen comes alive with light and movement — opalescent panels pulse, geometric grids surround patches of color and then dissolve behind tonal veils.
From time to time, the mists resolve into representational images, usually bits of architecture. A "wall" appears and then gives way as portals glide open, Star Trek-style, to reveal hidden spaces behind it — a slot filled with lapping orange shapes like flames in some virtual après-ski fireplace; a deep black ground twinkling with dots of light, suggesting a snowy winter night.
Minutes pass as the shapes and colors shift and dissolve to a soundtrack of whispers and swellings in sync with the visual rhythms, until finally the cool, hypnotic work comes full circle and starts again.
"I think of them as a cross between a painting and a lava lamp," Mr. Kinz says as he brings the lights back up. Though the two concepts might seem incompatible, the description turns out to be evocative: not only of Mr. Blake's work but also of the often incongruous nature of art in a digital age. Advances in computing power, production processes and material science have given today's artists new ways of working and new tools to work with.
They have in turn set off an aesthetic free- for-all characterized by increasingly sophisticated hybrid projects involving disparate mediums and genres. Instead of paintings, sculptures or drawings, viewers might get virtual environments, automated sculpture- making machines, mutable photographic imagery or complex musical compositions built on computer noise.
Like Mr. Blake, who trained as a painter but now employs techniques more closely allied with filmmaking, photography, installation or digital design, the artists pioneering these new combinatory forms are producing work that thwarts conventional categorization. They're also stirring dramatic changes in artistic practice.
No longer deployed simply for their bells and whistles, hi-tech modes of artistic production are rapidly becoming commonplace. They are also being integrated, ever more regularly and subtly, with existing practices. For the next few months, a pair of major museum exhibitions — "010101: Art in Technological Times" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (through July 8) and "BitStreams" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (opening on Thursday and running through June 10) — will examine the growing convergence between art and technology.
"There are countless artists who are engaging digital technologies to make their work," says Lawrence Rinder, curator of contemporary art at the Whitney and the lead curator for "BitStreams," "sometimes in places where you least expect it and absolutely across media — in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video."
The increasing use of technological materials and methods is more than simply a formal or stylistic phenomenon, Mr. Rinder says. Artists are also creating resonant new reflections of modern life. "But it goes beyond that," he says. "I do think there are ways in which some of the metaphors that are being opened to us by the use of digital technology are useful for thinking about things like consciousness and being, things that have always been with us."
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