At Eyebeam, Llarena's Urballoon inhabited the gallery like an overgrown and eerily conscious weather beacon. His strategy for taking art to the skies was to install a webcam, video projecto,r and a WiFi enabled iBook to a large balloon. It floats a hundred feet above a public space and projects text and images onto the land below that it receives through Urballoon.com.

One room over, Carrie Dashow assembled iMacs® in a half circle to show a ten-channel video that was filmed by ten people, all starting and returning to the same spot in Caumsett, Long Island. "The installation shows each view simultaneously as participants disband through a forest choosing their own paths," Dashow explained. The abundance of screens challenges viewers to follow several at a time, which is surprisingly possible to do.

Naturally, some of the work created at Eyebeam lives online. Ann Poochareon, in conjunction with Eyebeam's Contagious Media Group, used viral marketing techniques to establish a wide audience for websites that she designed.

What is Victoria's Secret (Whatisvictoriassecret.com) comes up second in a Google search for "Victoria's Secret" and features its own lingerie-clad models in a bulimic daze. The site gets over a thousand unique hits a day. Poochareon praised the unpredictable nature of such sites, referred to as "memes," because marketers have not been able to come up with a formula to exploit them. However, they are tracked by sites such as Memepool.com and Blogdex.net.

"The point is that these websites or email forwards are spread through people by ways of other people," said Poochareon, who added that the prevalence of PowerBooks® in the circles she travels in "is becoming somewhat of a big, ridiculous cult." Another site from Contagious Media is Rejectionline.com, through which they set up and publicized a prerecorded messaging service designed to ditch unwanted suitors. It became an international phenomenon and received over a million forlorn or hopeful phone calls.

These sites show how it's possible to make a big impact on the Internet with little to no budget and a relatively simple concept, said Poochareon. For example, Eyebeam staff member Andrea Harner gets up to seven thousand hits a day on her blog, Andreaharner.com, and noted that this kind of visibility is newly available to starting artists.

Inquisitive playfulness is a higher priority than sharpening a conceptual edge at Eyebeam-something that makes it okay for some of the work to fail as "art." But the traditional role of artists to wake us up to our surroundings and the lives we are living remains. Perhaps we need this more now than ever.