The authors reflect on the experiences of collaboration between artists and scientists at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They outline the measures that enable both media artists and computer scientists to benefit from the collaborations. In particular, if long-term collaborations are to be successful, the collaborators must garner rewards not only in the field of the collaboration but also in their own respective academic or professional fields.

The essay focuses on the processes of intermedia in visual media. The author's analysis of the merging of still, moving and computed images reveals that, in intermedia, images tend to-ward a spatial, rather than temporal, organizing prin-ciple. This shift becomes evident in particular in the moving images in such elec-tronic films as Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books. The limits of intermedia in the electronic medium are unfolded in the concept of the coherent im-age by Zbigniew Rybczynski. Another concept of com-pression and convergence is demonstrated by Clea T. Waite in her crossing two-and three-dimensionality in a video installation.