This essay seeks to historicize the technological production of artistic virtual space, which is often misconstrued as having originated with contemporary new media art production. The author critically investigates Le Corbusier's Poème électronique, a 1958 automated multimedia performance commissioned by the Philips Corporation for its pavilion at the World's Fair in Belgium, as a paradigmatic example of much earlier attempts to create a spatialized, virtual experience in the spectator.

The similarity in fractal dimensions of paint “blobs” in samples of gestural expressionist art implies that these pigment structures are statistically indistinguishable from one another. This conclusion suggests that such dimensions cannot be used as a “finger-print” for identifying the work of a single artist. To overcome this limitation, the authors have adopted the multifractal spectrum as an alternative tool for artwork analysis. For the pigment blobs, it is demonstrated that this spectrum can be used to isolate a construction paradigm or art style.

The author describes his development of a computer-based paper-marbling tool, based on a traditional Turkish art form in which marbled-paper figures and patterns are created on the surface of a liquid bath. Similar works can be obtained by simulating fluid flows on a computer, using the Navier-Stokes equations as the physical model of the fluid flows. The author has created an application program that includes marbling tools. Such a program must run in real time, so that hand-eye coordination is required of the user. Real-time simulation of fluid flows requires much processor power.