It's finally rained and the scorched grass in Southern England will, hopefully, if slowly, recover.  It's been probably 21 days without any sight or sign of raindrops - sigh! - but the drought's now broken and the sky is a reassuring grey.  I went last night to the Wellcome Trust's sparklingly clean bookshop in its imposing buildings at Euston for a launch of Stephen Wilson's latest art and science related publication: Art and Science Now, which has been published by Thames and Hudson and probably for the first time in terms of press coverage in relation to collaborative and interdisciplinary work, has had mainstream coverage - see <http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/28/environmental-art> - something which is good to see for its rarity and yet somehow also it seems so late. Wilson has wisely produced the first 'illustrated survey of its kind' about practitioners who "see themselves as outside the worlds of both art and science, and are attempting to carve out a new niche of cultural experimentation and invention". The marketing blurbs sells this as about 250 works made since 2000.One of the livelier artists there last night admitted their work had actually been made in 1998 (oops). It is interesting that often research-based work has to be argued into a certain time period in order to be made visible or given some validation. We see this also with some prizes for media art that seek a certain legitimacy from things being recent or 'new.  Wilson's book argues that we are now seeing the 'first generation' of a new kind of hybrid artist. The coffee table nature of the publication, strong on visuals, not particulary strong on indepth analysis and lacking in many insights of a political nature, is inevitably being critiqued for its lack of depth (something which Wilson's earlier publication, Information Arts, was very strong on, digging into recent histories and plugging gaps in knowledge through drawing lines across decades of development.  Thinking about curves in time I found myself in the last few days at Plymouth University, where Professor Mike Phillips and his team have been well ahead also of academic curves in their occupancy and resourcing of a Visual Immersive Theatre (a digital dome structure) which acts an experimental space for visualisation of research from various disciplines as well as arts design and media content utilising emerging projector software and camera innovations which are an exciting research area in their own right. With an audience of forty people including Matt Black a pioneer of VJ culture in the UK in the 90s as well as representatives from the Weimar Bauhaus University where students can study full dome content production as part of their BA Media course - we watched some  brain-stirring material that combines (in my mind at least) aspects of audio visual, games, VR, science communication, data visualisation, film, engineering and design components into a new mesh, a new meld, a new form of mediated experience that borders on collective interaction as we experience the 'vection' effect where you sense you are moving actually into and within the borders of the work (an effect that remains later when you are well out of the dome and should no longer be experiencing a concensual hallucination). For example we had up and close experience of a fruitfly even more beautiful to my eyes at least than Robert Hooke's flea in the  marvellous Micrographica...the hours of rendering gave us insights into the deepest structures of this creature including perceiving a small parasite in its stomach which had been previously imperceptible even to the trained biologist eye using conventional microscopy.  The audience also included Jaromil who was in town for Roy Ascott's Planetary Collegium - or Interplanetary Collision as it will forever be known by this group of  Full Dome attendees.