offers her software products but also mailing lists awash with cryptic messages. Her «Nato» software is currently one of the most popular tools used by all VJs for live visuals, as it can attach any visual object directly to a sound and thus create a flow of images that are linked to the music but can be mixed and edited as wished. But this software, unlike Markus Popp's, is not a semiartistic demonstration, but a sharply professional product with high licence fees that claim a monopoly. And besides (or should one say nevertheless?) Netochka Nezvanova has also been awarded a whole series of prizes in software art competitions for programs like «Nebula M.81», which also permit a direct transformation of image and sound data. This ambivalence is typical of an artistic figure whose name would mean «nameless nobody» if translated. This makes her even less open than all the examples mentioned so far to being placed in genres and categories, whether they are image and sound, or art, technology and commerce. And now passage from avant-garde to mainstream no longer takes decades, as in the case of Ruttmann or Paik, but happens almost simultaneously with the help of the product or

artefact (the term work of art no longer fits at all) used in both contexts. All five current examples show that after over a hundred years of audio-visual media development it is not just the border between image and sound that is becoming fluid in many art forms (or should we say artefacts?). The old parallel history of aesthetic and pragmatic machines continues, but the borders between the two are questionable. As in the 1950s and 1960s, both the classical concept or the work and the position of the artist-author are being questioned. And although the marketing principles and cultural institutions of music and art have remained remarkably unchanged in this long period, the new technologies are producing an intermediate space that is not yet defined precisely. This offers hope of an alternative to the cycle of marketing, technical innovation and commercial cultural production. Let us go back to people with synaesthetic inclinations who often suffer from the fact that any music makes them see colours and shapes until they learn to enjoy this talent. Neuro-biology suggests that we all have synaesthetic experiences in our early childhood and learn to separate images from sounds only slowly.