In a postindustrial information economy, most people are seen as working with mediated abstractions rather than with real things. Because of the power of computer representations, workers in many businesses don’t see the real objects of their business during the workday. Telecommunication substitution of mediated symbols for physical presence highlights this trend. The conceptualization of a hyper-reality dominated by media images and circulating signifiers and codes increasingly disconnected from their referents speaks to the questionable status of things and organisms. Virtual reality technology promises to increase the power of representation to substitute for material experience. Some ecologists suggest that a mediated world might be good, because the endless production and consumption of things is suicidal.

D. Haraway points toward a future when bodies themselves might be decreasingly relevant. The perception and meaning of even fundamental “realities” such as disease and sex are profoundly shaped by ideology. The assessment of the decline of the importance of the material world is a critical issue for the arts and culture at large. On a basic level, the diminished importance of the physical seems overstated. Birth, death, health, disease, and the everyday realities of eating, moving, and sex are still essential to human experience. Many of the world’s peoples still struggle to survive and spend their days contending with the physical world, while even in the developed world there is a growing uneasiness about the incompleteness of computer simulations and representations of reality. E. Ferguson posits that fatal design flaws in advanced technology such as the Challenger are due to “inexperience or hubris or both and reflect an apparent ignorance of the limits of stress in materials and people under chaotic conditions.

Successful design still requires expert tacit knowledge and intuitive ‘feel’ based on experience.” Historically, the arts have spanned both the material and the representational—working with images at the same time as they celebrated the substantiality and sensuality of real things, as in sculpture and architecture. As Walter Benjamin noted in “Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Representation,” technologies such as photography and cinema decreased the importance of presence and “aura.” Questions of materiality and corporeality are critical for artists working with new technologies. The imaging, communications, and information technologies they work with are key facilitators of this mediated world. The work they do helps to explore and settle new worlds of representation. Yet, it is not inevitable that new technologies only work with representation.

The technologies that manipulate physical things, for example: robotics, nanotechnology, material sciences, alternative energy research, and biotechnology, have been less accessible to artists and the general public. These technologies will be increasingly important and point toward futures when technologically mediated material things have increasing importance. The following chapters review artists and researchers working at the cutting edge of virtuality; they also present artists and researchers who do not accept the inevitability of a vision in which materiality becomes unimportant.