New media art both connects to and expands the dematerialization of the art object that occurred in earlier art movements. The new media object is a process in flux that is potentially interactive, dynamic, participatory and customizable and often oscillates between its inherent ephemeral nature and its material components or peoples desire to objectify it.

The Passage of Mirage features nine projects that address these issues by portraying the virtual object as a process, a data structure (or carrier thereof), or as an encoded reality. The artworks expand notions of the traditional art object, sometimes quite specifically with regard to more established art forms such as photography, film, or painting.

The works of Jim Campbell and Thomson & Craighead, for example, offer different approaches to processing the medium of film. Campbell's Illuminated Average #1 creates an average of all the frames of Hitchock's Psycho and collapses the film into one single image; by contrast, the artist's Night Light visualizes Psycho's sound level and the brightness of the image throughout the film. Thomson & Craighead's Short Films about Flying is an edition of unique cinematic works that were generated in real-time from existing data found on the World Wide Web: each "movie" (replete with opening titles and end credits) combines a video feed from Logan Airport in Boston with randomly loaded net radio sourced from elsewhere in the world.

John Gerrard's Watchful Portrait and Carlo Zanni's Altarboy both transform a portrait into a "living" process that is networked or responds to haptic sensation; and Wolfgang Staehle's and Vuk Cosic's works present a "live" version of a photograph or painting. In very different ways, the idea of the object as data carrier unfolds both in W. Bradford Paley's Code Profiles and Eric Paulos' Limelight, a sculptural object that doubles as automated threat detection and indication system.

While still informed by the aesthetics of more traditional media, the artworks in the exhibition are media objects that are process-oriented, reactive, or open to (real-time) data processing and intervention.