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Lanier is in familiar territory: he is widely considered to be the father of virtual reality. Though his name is not yet common fare on the cocktail-party circuit of the cultural elite, he is a star of an astoundingly energized new movement of musicians and visual artists who are defining and redefining their work through the use of cybertechnology. ``The computer is now an accepted tool,'' says David Ross, director of the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art. ``In the art world, it is no longer an issue.'' From the fashionably bohemian precincts of lower Manhattan to London and Los Angeles, the cultural world abounds with computer-aided musicians, CD-ROM virtuosos, painters, photographers and digital artists who are building their own galleries in cyberspace -- all in addition to the digitally savvy filmmakers who have already transformed cinema. Lanier embodies a whole new genre of music that uses computers to create and disseminate its own distinctive sounds. Another practitioner on the rise is Italian astrophysicist Fiorella Terenzi, 30, who has been described as a cross between Madonna and Carl Sagan. Terenzi has used audio telescopes to intercept radio waves from a galaxy 180 million light-years away, then fed them into a computer, applied a sound-synthesis program to convert her data into music and produced Music from the Galaxies. Result: part New Age, part Buck Rogers sound track, played on an oscilloscope. The Future Sound of London, one of Britain's trendiest club bands, performed ``live'' last November at the Kitchen in New York City -- while physically remaining in its studio on Chapter Road in Dollis Hill, London. The group's banks of synthesizers and samplers, as well as its three-dimensional silicon graphics, were wired through the Internet to speakers and screens 5,000 miles away. The band members promise that within 18 months they will produce a 3-D film of themselves performing in a virtual environment. Piqued by the possibilities of a new medium, Old Guard rockers are seeking to reinvent themselves cyber-electronically. A foray into the techno-arts has not only revived but enhanced the career of once forgotten pop singer Thomas Dolby. Last year his Virtual String Quartet -- a 3-D imaging project in which people played computerized instruments in virtual space -- found its way to the SoHo Gallery of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Other performers, such as Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel and Todd Rundgren, are venturing into the rapidly growing territory of CD-ROM, which takes the present CD a step further by adding visuals. Dylan's newly released Highway 61 Interactive serves as an elaborate audiovisual historiography. Besides 10 Dylan songs and four videos, it features an electronic scrapbook that includes the singer's high school photos. CD-ROMs like Gabriel's Xplora and Rundgren's No World Order invite viewers/listeners to reassemble images and change tempo and mood, customizing tracks to their own tastes. One of Gabriel's upcoming projects, Eve, will allow users to remix sampled sounds while creating their own screen environment from images provided by four collaborating visual artists. While some in the arts might flinch at the notion of forfeiting control of their work, Gabriel champions the idea. ``The point is to put people inside the work of artists in such a way that they can explore it and eventually become artists themselves,'' he says. ``The CD-ROM is the first practical, tangible step