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In response to Gloria, and Steve Dietz on issues of patronage and institutional support… It's probably useful here to differentiate the "art world" (defined by art museums and galleries, curators and critics) from the academic art world (defined by university and college art departments, graduate programs, funding sources and exhibition venues). "New Media" has achieved a level of institutional accommodation in the academic art world that is truly mind-boggling. Most of this is enrollment driven. For the past ten years or so the demand for various courses and programs in computing and new media has increased exponentially (especially for software skills and lower level/basic programming skills vs. the kind of training one receives in a straight computer science/engineering program). In most cases this enrollment demand is driven by students (and compliant parents) who see (rightly or wrongly) computer skills as a guarantee of employment but want to avoid the déclassé associations of “technical institutes” like DeVry, etc. At the same time, research universities in the US, which are increasingly coming to function as adjuncts to corporate biotech and engineering interests, like to channel money to the arts (especially to art that parades some connection to “science” or “technology”) to help preserve their aura of high-minded scholarly inquiry and renaissance learning. The result of this pincer movement is an unprecedented flood of money and resources into art departments in the US that can present themselves as committed to “new media” or “computing and the arts”. There are numerous faculty lines opening up in this area, in some cases with levels of research support for individual artists that would have been unimaginable (and certainly unavailable) to studio artists ten years ago. Of course most of the artists fortunate enough to benefit from this confluence of forces want to imagine that they are, in fact, subverting the corporate-industrial power structure from within (the question of who is really subverting whom might be worth pursuing at a later date on this list). It seems to me that any attempt to outline a sociology of the “new media artist” (relative to his or her level of institutional cooptation or privilege) needs to consider academic institutions as well as traditional art world institutions, as a locus of power and ideology. I’d be interested to hear how the situation in other countries differs. Best, Grant Kester