STRANGE SOUNDS AND SIGHTS

With shoulder-length red dreadlocks and an intense gaze, Jaron Lanier is a striking presence, even in the strange universe of performance art. But then he does nothing so routine as, say, recite sonnets while cartwheeling nude across a stage. Lanier is a virtual-reality performance artist. In his piece, The Sound of One Hand, which has played to packed theaters in Chicago, Toronto and Linz, Austria, he appears onstage framed by the image of a virtual world he enters when he dons special goggles and a DataGlove. His audience sees what he sees -- and what he does, which is bend and stretch like some contorted stork. His movements elicit eerie, tinkling notes from the computer-generated virtual instruments he is playing: a Cybersax, a CyberXylo and a Rhythm Gimbal.