Shawn Brixey's "Altimira" is a decidedly strange work of art--so strange that he has not, to date, put it on public display. He turns on a device, housed in a basketball-size glass chamber, and it converts rapidly pulsating radio signals emanating from pulsars--collapsed stars that spin violently, sweeping their poles like lighthouses through space--and directs them via goggles into the retina of a viewer, activating intensely the phenomena known as "phosphenes" that one sees when rubbing one's eyes. Those high-tech qualities are typical of the art that Mr. Brixey and his colleagues produce, teach, and study at the University of Washington's Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media. This center, which goes by the abbreviation DXArts, is arguably the most innovative workshop of its kind. It engages in experimental arts that include digital media, computer animation, computer music, and sound art, and many novel combinations of those already esoteric fields. It also deals in the artistic uses and implications of "telematics"--the blending of communications devices--and "mechatronics"--the intersections of mechanical, electronic, and software engineering, applied to the design of automatons and other hybrid systems.