Camera Rasa: In the discourse of virtuality, the imagination confronts a camera rasa -- a blank room, the erased slate of the tabula rasa extruded into three dimensions -- and renders into it all manners of wonders.

Commodity Camaraderie: The primary cohesive force binding electronic artists, less a shared sense of artistic destiny than the common use of similar tools.

Demo or Die: The demonstration, or "demo," is the defining moment of the digital artist's practice at the turn of the millennium. The failure to demo leads to the end of financial and/or critical support, hence, "Demo or Die." Dialectical Immaterialism: A vapor theory of ruminations unsupported by material underpinnings.

Digital Dialectic: A method to ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice, combining critical investigations of contemporary culture with the hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of new technologies.

Dynamic Non-Conscious: Higher-order computer mediated communication brings about a relationship between the human user's split psyche - both conscious and unconscious - and the non-, but pseudo- consciousness of the computer. The dynamic non-conscious, then, is the machine part of the human computer interface.

The Edenic Fallacy: A never ending idyllicization of nature in the service of a feel-good eco-aesthetic practiced by too many of artists who employ vastly expensive technologies to create their work. A puzzling tendency to create simplistic critiques of machine culture using systems dependent on the latest hardware and software.

The Electronic Corpse: One of the default settings of net.art. The digital era's take on the Surrealists's Exquisite Corpse, the Electronic Corpse ships images over the net and around the globe, in the hopes of creating a truly collaborative art form. The usual result is rasterbated murk.

Electronic Semiotics: A mutated science of signs that confronts the truth value of digital photography. The computerðs photo-graphic brings about a return to the aesthetic of the pre-photographic era, to a signscape that is reduced to the dichotomy between the word and the image, though both are now merely different outputs of the same binary code.

Future/present: In an era of technological hyper-obsolescence, the present is no longer sufficient, we have need of a future/present, a phenomenological equivalent to the future perfect tense.

Hardscape: The built structures that house or hold the visual screens that constitute hybrid architecture's imagescapes. Hybrid architecture: Architectural systems that combine the built hardscapes with mutable imagescapes.

Hype Cycle: A technology develops in obscurity, then a breakthrough either real or imagined thrusts it into the glare of the mediasphere. Claims are made, then exaggerated by those who do not fully understand what they are promoting. The inability of these technologies to deliver what they never promised finally brings on a long, dark winter of media avoidance.

Hyperaesthetics: A dynamic aesthetics applied to dynamic arts. Hyperaesthetics requires theorization in real-time. Imagescapes: The mutable visual technologies embedded within and/or covering the built hardscapes of conventional architecture.

Media of Attractions: Artifacts of digital culture where the appeal is essentially their perceived novelty.  They attract less for what they mean than for the fact that they are.

Nano-thoughts: Ideas, metaphors, and images processed down to their smallest units, and then repeated ad nauseam throughout digital databases.

Neologorrhea: The compulsive, almost hysterical need to neologize, to create new words to describe and confront new situations. Neologorrhea is pandemic within the technoculture.

Nostalgia for the future: The condition that allows us the mental space to confront the ever redoubling speed of digital technologies which render them obsolete memories in the blink of an eye.

The Paradox of Unfolding: The quality of virtual architecture in which users approach objects in cyberspace, moving towards them only to have them transform, or unfold, into new objects.  It is a spatialization of the mathematical concept of infinite regression.

Permanent Present: The sense that for all the technological innovations of the past two decades, our visual culture remains trapped in a relentless present, idly circling itself as if waiting for inspiration it doesn't expect to come. The situation of being unable to imagine a future more interesting, viable or beautiful than the moment in which we live now.

Photo-graphic: In a digital environment, the discrete photograph is transformed into the essentially unbounded graphic. The formerly "unique" photograph has been merged, even submerged, into the computerðs overall visual environment.

Post Œ89 Theory: A loosely structured set of approaches to contemporary art and culture that lives in, with and through new technologies in complex and entirely self-conscious ways, wherever that may lead. It rejects the mercantilism of futurism on the one hand, it eschews any spirit of renunciation on the other.

Science-fictionalized Discourse: An ever-escalating cycle of conjecture and unsubstantiated speculation, which generally sorts out into odd combinations of utopian longings, dystopian warnings, and technomysticism.

TechnoVolksgeist: As digital artists and other groups heavily invested in the creative use of technology extend their commodity camaraderie from software to platform to network, they transform the idea of a geographically
specific Bohemia into a broader concept of the user group as proto-social
formation.

Unitary Virtuality (UV): The quest for fully immersive virtual reality systems that are completely mutable, controllable environments. VR inherited this synaesthetic fantasy without even realizing it from such 1960s groups as the Situationist International and Archigram.

Vapor theory: Dialectical immaterialism, critical discussions about technology untethered to the constraints of production.  Vapor theory often mutates into techno-mysticism, and can lead even exceptionally able thinkers into a hype-driven discourse that dates instantly. See Digital Dialectic.

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