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The mysterious brainwave drawings look like abstract art, and consist of a live participant's brainwaves that are read with electrodes and converted to graphics by a device called the Brainmaster.

The brainwave graphic is integrated with video of the brainwave artist's face, chosen from a live audience at Banff, and streamed onto the Web Seance home page, where it meets the video of another brainwave artist at Suzerain. These two video streams come together in Shockwave, where they are underlaid by constantly changing images of glowing, multiplying orbs or an image of growing moss.

Whichever graphic is used, its growth in onscreen size increases with the number of online visitors who log onto the Web Seance home page during a performance. Each visitor is also represented by an IP number, which pops onscreen as they log on.

"In showing the IP numbers of Web participants, we're stating the authenticity of the piece's interactivity," says Hartzell. "And in attributing participants' written contributions to their IP numbers, the piece comments on the nature of identity, as seen by the medium. We're very interested in the relation between individual and collective identity."

During the 16 June performance, 60 unique IP numbers represented online participants, and during the 30 June performance, that figure jumped to 90.

"It's so illogical that it's very exciting," says Perry Bard, a New York City artist and member of the international online art collective known as Virtual Revolutions. Bard was physically present during a Web Seance rehearsal in New York in early June and later logged onto the Web Seance site for the 16 June performance.