Introduction
CAiiA-STAR is a world-wide research community, founded and directed by Roy Ascott, whose innovative structure involves collaborative work and supervision both in cyberspace and at regular meetings in the UK and abroad. It combines, as an integrated research platform, CAiiA, the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts at University of Wales College Newport, and STAR, the Science Technology and Art Research Centre in the University of Plymouth. It has the aim of creating new knowledge through research in the theory and practice of interactive art , and is recognised as a leading centre in this field. CAiiA-STAR seeks the integration of art and technology within a post-biological culture, and is involved in advancing the parameters of this emergent field (e.g. telematics, immersive VR, Mixed Reality, Alife, architecture, hypermedia,telepresence and agent technology, transgenics, data imaging, intelligent environments, generative music, technoetics). It is a community of closely connected doctoral candidates, graduates, post-doctoral researchers, advisors, associates and supervisors. These high level professionals are committed, through collaboration and shared discourse, to pushing the boundaries of their art. For these reasons the level of research is extremely high and the methodologies employed are extensive and rigorous.

Research Supervision
Research is supervised and directed by Professor Roy Ascott, assisted at the University of Wales Newport by Dr. Michael Punt (Deputy Director CAiiA), Professor Miranda Aldhouse-Green (Celtic Studies)) and Prof. Geoff Roberts (Mechatronics); and at University of Plymouth by Mike Phillips (Deputy Director STAR), and Chris Speed (hypermedia), Dr.Guido Bugman (robotics), Dr.Angelo Cangelosi (Alife), Dr.Peter Jagodzinski (HCI). The transdisciplinary team of external supervisors includes Professor Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Art History, University of Texas at Austin), the late Dr. Francesco Varela (Cognitive Neurosciences and Cerebral Imagery, CRNS, Paris) , Professor John L. Casti (Complexity, Santa Fe Institute and Technical University, Vienna), Professor Tom Ray (Alife, University of Oklahoma), Roger Malina (Astrophysics, Laboratoire d'Astronomie Spatiale, Marseille), Dr. Kristine Stiles (Art History, Duke University, North Carolina), Dr. Simon Waters (Music, University of East Anglia), Professor Francis Rousseaux (Informatics, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne), Carol Gigliotti (Emily Carr School of Art, Vancouver).

PhD candidates
Current doctoral candidates include: Char Davis (Immersence, Montreal), Eduardo Kac (Associate Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (both Associate Professors at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Gifu, and artistic Directors at the ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Lab, Kyoto, Japan), Professor Donna Cox (Professor, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Marcos Novak (independent architect, Los Angeles), Niranjan Rajah (Associate Dean of Arts, University of Malaysia, Sarawak), Jim Laukes (Director, Consciousness Program, University of Arizona), Pamela Jennings (Assistant Professor, Electronic Arts and HCI, Carnegie Mellon University), Peter Anders (independent architect, Michigan), Elisa Giaccardi (Fondazione Fitzcaraldo, Turin), Gretchen Schiller ( Professor, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III), Thecla Schiphorst (Professor, Technical University of British Columbia), Kieran Lyons (Senior Lecturer, Interactive Arts, UWCN) , Jon Bedworth (CAiiA), , Dan Livingstone, and Geoff Cox (both Senior Lecturers in the School of Computing, University of Plymouth. And as of October 2001: Monika Fleischmann (Director, MARS Exploratory Media Lab, German National Research Center for Information Technology), Ron Wakkari (Dean of Academic Planning, Technical University of British Columbia), Maiia Engeli (Chair, Architecture and CAAD, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich).

PhD graduates
PhD degrees have been awarded to Jill Scott (Professor, Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar. Thesis: Digital Body Automata ), Dew Harrison (Lecturer, University of West of England, Bristol. Thesis: Hypermedia Systems: the creation and interpretation of concept-based art), Bill Seaman (Professor, Dept. Design/Media arts, UCLA. Thesis: Recombinant Poetics; Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored within a specific Gererative Virtual Environment), Joseph Nechvatal (Visiting Lecturer, Visual Arts, New York. Thesis: Immersive Ideals/Critical Distances ), Victoria Vesna (Professor and Chair, Design/Media Arts, UCLA. Thesis: Networked Public Spaces: an investigation into Virtual Embodiment), and Miroslaw Rogala (Director, Integrated Media Arts, Brooklyn College, CUNY. Thesis: Strategies for Interactive Public Art: dynamic mapping with (v)user behaviour and multi-linked experience).

Research Sessions
Research is conducted online and at three ten-day face-to-face Composite Sessions each year, involving individual tutorials, research seminars, critical round tables, and a public conference. The Centre is regularly invited to hold its Composite Sessions at universities and media centres abroad, These sessions and conferences have been hosted by Artspace Media Centre, Dublin (1997); La Beneficia Cultural Centre, Valencia (1998); CYPRES, Marseilles (1999); Federal University, Rio de Janeiro (1999); University of Arizona, Tucson (2000); and the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2000), Fondazione Fitzcaraldo, Turin (2001). . Additionally, CAiiA-STAR initiated and co-sponsored the international conference Invenção in Sao Paulo, Brazil (1999) in collaboration with the ITAU Cultural Centre, the International Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA), and the journal Leonardo. The CAiiA-STAR International Research Conference Consciousness Reframed: art and consciousness in the post-biological era, has been held in 1997, 1998, and 2000, on each occasion attracting over 100 presenters from more than 25 countries. As a Centre, we contribute in parallel to the bi-annual Towards a Science of Consciousness conference at Tucson, providing two pre-conference workshops on interactive arts research at the April 2000 meeting.

CAiiA-STAR publications
The CAiiA conferences have resulted in the publication of two books: Ascott, R. (ed). 2000. Art Technology Consciousness. Bristol: Intellect Books. 234 pp. ISBN 1-84150-041-0, and Ascott, R. (ed). 1999. Reframing Consciousness. Exeter: Intellect Books. 314 pp. ISBN 1-184150-013-5. Professor Ascott guest edited the Special Issue: Computers and Post-Biological Art, Digital Creativity, 9,1. 61pp., and with Dr. Punt published A Speculative Bibliography of Art and Consciousness in Convergence, 4, (3), pp. 116-134. The 1998 CAiiA conference in Valencia, Spain, resulted in a bi-lingual book of essays by CAiiA researchers: Molina. A & Landa. K. (eds), 2000. Emergent Futures: Art, Interactivity and New Media/ Futuros Emergentes , Arte Interactividad y Nuevos Medios. Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnánim. pp.108. ISBN 84-7822-326-6.

Future development
As a structural development of CAiiA-STAR, while continuing to seek a synthesis of art, technology and science, we see three inter-related cores of research emerging: (a) arts practice and theory; (b) access, presentation, archiving (e.g. the intelligent museum); (c) creative education (new approaches to learning by, through and for new media arts). We shall respond to requests we have received from countries wishing to establish regional "hubs" providing research programmes based on the model we have developed. This is part of a strategy to build a Planetary Collegium, a global network of small intensive research hubs, which in turn has developed from the project Identity in Cyberspace: Pilot Project for a European Cyberspace Collegium, commissioned by the C.E.C. (DG XXII), Brussels.