The answer, it turns out, is yes, with a twist. A number of Bay Area artists are taking the technology that is transforming the area and making art with and about it.
Several factors make the Bay Area a fertile region for technology-related art.
Artists there are surrounded by technology as dot-com companies take over industrial neighborhoods that were once artists' haunts. Splashy Internet advertising plasters billboards and dominates radio spots. There are also last year's products, discarded by the tech industry but still useful to artists, as is technological know-how. Mr. Campbell, who works in Silicon Valley as a hardware engineer three days a week, said that the Bay Area creates an environment in which technology and art feed off each other. Ken Goldberg, a technology artist who is also an engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said there was no question that the technology revolution was making itself felt in art circles.