Artists and psychologists have been experimenting with synesthesia for centuries. The author provides a historical review to show that artists and psychologists have always had great difficulty manipulating and controlling the phenomenon of synesthesia. Within these limits, artistic experiments with color organs, musical paintings and visual music have primarily uncovered perceptual and emotional aspects of synesthesia. Psychological experiments have produced a variety of methodologies to aid the study of synesthesia.

The authors invite readers and others, including aliens (provided they claim to have female first names), to submit “things” to the MARS PATENT project for interplanetary exhibition on Mars and on the Internet. The MARS PATENT High Reality Machine will teleport sculptures, theories, web art and other things, imaginable or not fully imaginable, to the exhibition site on the red planet. The authors have also established the Oldenburg-Reiche Prize, an open competition challenging artists, scientists and others to come up with a satisfying explanation for how the High Reality Machine works.

Acompressed series of possible histories of science in modern music, the text outlines the themes of poetic and historic correspondences between music, cosmology and the body that informed the making of Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies, a multimedia installation and live sound-art performance by Flow Motion in which data from possible black hole Cygnus X1 is transformed into an immersive electronic sound-and-image environment.