inaccessible and/or unfamiliar. The works of the artists described in this text bring people closer to technology on many different levels. Some only create curiosity and wonder (the first level of familiarity); others clearly aim at audience participation or even education. All of these works deal with the public domain as a virtual, mediated space consisting of both material and immaterial matter.

Performing physical interfaces: Face-to-face with technology

Media art performances, easily accessible media art installations, and media art workshops with or without real time network connections are the missing link between art works in the old and the new public domain. Whereas online platforms (as described later on in this text) still have a certain kind of similarity of form and feel, which is probably due to their basis in group collaboration, these physical interfaces (and also artist software) have specific individual or (small) group aesthetics that make them more recognizable as art projects for most contemporary art audiences.

Complex media art performances and installations have been created throughout the history of electronic media. [4] Not all of these have opened the

artwork to the streets or engaged with the audience in a profound way. The element of physical presence and ‹availability› of the artist inside an art performance, event, or happening (to re-use an old term again) is probably the strongest possible way to engage an audience. But the presence of the artist can also be ‹sensed› in another way, as is the case with «Project-X» by Heath Bunting.

Engaging physical interfaces is the most direct way to reach large audiences. They connect the space of media with the spaces of the world we generally call the physical world. Media spaces are also physical, but we tend to not experience them as such. They are said to be ephemeral or immaterial. They consist partly of a manipulation of natural phenomena through the use of various machine interfaces and partly of a cultural or psychological experience. To become aware of them and the possibilities they offer for interaction or other usage they have to be made visible, tangible or ‹experienceable›. Machine or desktop interfaces do this for the individual one-on-one interaction, but for a media space that needs to be accessible as a whole, conceptually or