Among his picks: Jon Haddock's "Screenshots," which depict important historical events like Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in the banal style of a SimCity game. In addition to "John 3:16," the companion to his Biennial basketball video, Paul Pfeiffer will debut "Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom," a two-screen piece featuring a slyly altered version of Cecil B. DeMille's cameo in The Ten Commandments. Sculptor Robert Lazzarini uses 3-D modeling software to radically reshape iconic objects, including skulls, into arrestingly unfamiliar forms. "Each one is about the size of a real skull, except that their shapes are the result of compound distortions developed in a CAD file," Rinder explains. "The digital image is 'printed out' as a rapid prototype" -- a solid object of moldable resin -- "which is then used as a model for the final sculptures, which are made of real bone." Not all the art is visual: In a bank of headphones set up to feature audio art, John Hudak offers digitally enhanced, subtly hallucinatory field recordings of what turns out to be a rural pond. And Marina Rosenfeld's mysterious sampled soundscapes betray a warm sense of humor beneath their steel-and-silicon surface.

Rosenfeld's work shares a playful nervousness with much of the art in "BitStreams." Above all, "BitStreams" artists seem to be talking about indeterminacy. Nothing, they're telling us, is as it seems -- a situation they find both intensely amusing and deeply unsettling. "When an artist manipulates a photograph and you can't even tell which part, that's plugging into broad-based cultural anxiety about digital technology, that this is all part of some big thing to control us," suggests Rinder. "The culture as a whole has become anxious about a slippage between real and manufactured, digital reality."

Of course, "manufacturing reality" is a fairly apt job description for any artist, which may explain why technology has drawn so many under its spell. Rinder points out that even established figures like David Hockney and self-described technophobe Chuck Close (neither of whose work is in the show) are working with digital media these days. It presents too many creative opportunities to ignore. "The fears I have about privacy or manipulation are so vague and undirected," one artist muses. "Maybe that's why I want to do this work to begin with, to gain some mastery of this technology."

Then again, artists' uneasy excitement about the effects of digital media may turn out to be just an early reaction to the shock of the new. In ten years, questions about what part of a work is "really real" may be no more interesting than whether a painting is oil or acrylic.

"I didn't want to become an executive at a dot-com. I was always thinking, 'What kind of art can I make while I'm here?'"

A few doors toward the East River from Peter Luger Steak House, John Klima is living like a New York artist mythically should: in a cheap, wide-open, walk-up loft overflowing with current projects, used coffee cups, and a big, friendly mutt. His windows would look onto the Williamsburg Bridge and bathe the room in cool northern light -- if he hadn't covered them with a black tarpaulin so he can use his late-model digital video projector around the clock. Next to it, literally on a pedestal, sits a vintage 1981 TRS-80, the Radio Shack personal computer on which so many thirtysomething geeks cut their teeth.

"When I was 15, we got that Trash-80 and I learned programming, but then I got interested in girls, so I went to art school," Klima recounts in a squeak-prone voice that evokes Emo Philips. The sandy-haired 35-year-old is busily working a video-game controller to push and twist the virtual levers on an animated tourmaline orb that's being projected onto a small movie screen. This is how one plays "GlasBead," his Web-based virtual musical instrument. (Like many other lifelong gamers, he can easily play and conduct a thoughtful conversation at the same time.) After suny Purchase, he says, he did hardly any computer work for several years, instead kicking around the country and designing furniture to pay the bills. He landed in Seattle in the mid-nineties and, needing cash, logged back into his techie side, taught himself some new languages on a 286, and scored a freelance coding gig with Microsoft: "With that on my résumé, I realized I could get a job anywhere, so I moved back to New York." About a year later, he took a consulting job at Dun & Bradstreet, "twenty hours a week for crazy money," he says with a grin, "so I took it and used the other twenty hours a week to make art."

At "BitStreams," Klima will show Ecosystm, a dynamic 3-D simulation program that uses real-time financial and weather data from CNN and Yahoo! to control the behavior of virtual birds, trees, and other "natural" objects. A surging Swiss franc might result in, say, a growing flock of orange gulls, while the currency's volatility would determine how tightly the birds stay in formation. Ecosystm's relatively crude graphics won't soon be confused with a Pixar movie, and at first the way the piece harnesses an entire "world" to financial data seems almost willfully dorky. But it's also an incisive comment on the market's resemblance to video games, or the information-age tendency to interpret everything, even natural phenomena, in upticks and downticks.

Ecosystm also illustrates one of the most unusual issues surrounding digital art. In the end, what Klima created -- and was paid more than $14,000 for -- was a few thousand lines of code. The piece was commissioned by Zurich Capital Markets, an asset management firm whose New York chief, Randall Kau, decided he wanted to buy art that reflected a world in constant flux. Klima devised Ecosystm as a custom recreational-software package that Kau had installed on a giant plasma screen in the firm's kitchen, where traders now use it to blow off steam during breaks. (Users can steer around Ecosystm's animated planet, checking out various global markets as they fly.) The collaboration was a fruitful one: "It was ZCM's idea to use volatility numbers," Klima says. "And it was a good excuse to write a flocking algorithm, which is something I always wanted to do." Who wouldn't?

Klima heartily defends programming as every bit as legitimate an art form as drawing or painting. "Writing code is similar to making fine furniture -- your hand, your style, matters," he argues. Might art connoisseurship extend to the finer points of flight-path formulae? The brains behind "BitStreams" think Klima may be onto something. Sneakers, computers, and buildings conceived with the same off-the-rack Photoshop and Alias tricks do look more and more like one another's predictably curvilinear cousins. Says Rinder, "It is altogether possible that works made by artists who are writing their own code will stand out much as the handmade furniture of the Arts and Crafts artisans stood out from the industrially made furniture of their time."

ZCM's purchase remains exceptional. For the most part, hopes that New Economy fortunes would rain money onto tech art haven't panned out. This is partly because so much of that wealth has disintegrated, but there's still a lot of nerd money out there that just doesn't buy fine art. "You've got all these technology fortunes and very little involvement with them in the art scene," observes sfmoma's Benjamin Weil. "They haven't been enticed."

There's also the issue of what, exactly, a buyer of digital art gets. A meticulously boxed CD with a signed certificate? It's unlikely to be as satisfying as a painting you can see without having to boot up.

"My friends who make objects are such lucky bastards," says Leah Gilliam. Her "BitStreams" installation Apeshit v3 combines computers, software, sound, and digitally distorted Super-8 Planet of the Apes trailer footage -- plus a small lawn of live sod. Short of finding a collector with an unusually green thumb, such work may be a tough sell.

But there's hope. Like many of her peers, the moma's Barbara London compares today's market for digital art to the one for video in the early seventies, when Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill could barely give their work away. Today Nauman's pieces routinely bring six figures at auction, and Matthew Barney sells limited-edition copies of his Cremaster videos for up to $300,000. "History repeats itself," says London. "People just need a little time to figure it out."

In fact, they've already started to. "Bitstreams" artist John F. Simon Jr.'s work has sold to sfmoma, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim. CPU, in which Simon reuses old PowerBook screens to display his software-driven drawings, sold out a limited edition at $5,000 each. His ComplexCity, a fantasy representation of New York that riffs on Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, started at $15,000 and most recently sold for $24,000. His dealer, Sandra Gering, has a 70-client waiting list for his next work. Jeremy Blake's C-print still-frame shots from his animations sell through Feigen Contemporary for around $8,000; DVD copies of his fully realized "paintings," complete with sound and motion, command considerably more. Add in $15,000 more for a large-format plasma screen, and the cost of hanging a top-quality Blake above the mantel rises to well over $25,000. And that's before the Whitney puts its stamp on him.

Simon, Blake, and a few other earners are still the exceptions, of course. In digital art's nascent commercial terrain, even someone like John Klima still needs to make money, despite landing the occasional commission and regularly showing in galleries. (Currently at Postmasters Gallery on West 19th Street: Go Fish, a video game in which players who fail to steer a virtual goldfish through a 3-D maze cause a real goldfish to get flushed into a real tank of hungry predator fish. "Barbaric!" raves PETA.) Whenever he needs to pay bills, Klima just returns to the world of Wall Street coding. "It takes less time to do a $2,000 programming job than to apply for a $2,000 grant that you might not even get," he explains.