Most of Goldberg's professional life has been spent trying to design the perfect robotic hand. To be more specific, he works out complex geometric algorithms for robotics.

Goldberg, a UC Berkeley associate professor of industrial engineering, teaches courses in database and robotics. He won the 1995 Presidential Faculty Fellow from the National Science Foundation, an honor that comes with a nice $100,000 grant for research. When he's not teaching, he's doing his research in the form of art for the Web. The question he grapples with and tries to answer through his work is: "How does technology alter our perceptions of distance, scale and structure?"

He's perhaps most well-known for Telegarden. The project won the Kobe Prize at the interactive media festival in L.A. But, more interestingly, it was featured in Garden Design magazine, which called it a "search for the soul of gardening."

Whenever I've tried to describe the telegarden to someone, I've done it this way: "It's like a community garden for the Web. Users plant plants and if they don't water them, they die."

The response is always the same. "Oh, it's like one of those Tamagotchi things." Well, no, because the telegarden is a real garden. It's a real plot of petunias, peppers and marigolds in the very real Linz, Austria. A robot arm, controlled by users via the Internet, seeds and waters the plants and a live video feed lets users check the progress of their carpal-tunneled green thumbs.

Some users go in everyday. The most frequent gardeners have hit the site over 20,000 times -- choosing appropriate seeds and making sure they get the water they need. "They go in everyday," said Goldberg, 36. "They chat, they check their plants. People will post messages that say: I'm going on vacation; could anyone check my plants?"

Through projects like telegarden, Goldberg has learned that Web users are very protective of their reality. He has had users accuse him of placing pre-stored images of a garden on the site. They get furious at the thought that the garden might not be real. "We're living among all these illusions," Goldberg said. "When we put our trust out and feel betrayed, we care a lot."

Goldberg illustrates the "what is real," query by posturing this question: If it were advertised that for the past 10 years, the Louvre had been showing a *perfect* copy of the Mona Lisa, would it matter? Of course it would. If you had gone to the Louvre five years ago and pushed and shoved your way into perfect picture-taking range and then snapped a shot of a fake Mona Lisa, you'd feel ripped off.

"The authenticity of an object is tied to its physicality," said Goldberg. "It's something that has to do with it being painted by a particular person in a studio -- it has a certain feeling. Everyone perceives it. But in science, we don't know how to measure it."

So what is real? What are the differences between a pre-stored image and a "real" image? "We spend so much time on the 'net looking at digital reproductions," said Goldberg. "Yet we live in the real world and cling to meeting." His work centers on "telepresence," which he distinguishes from Virtual Reality this way: "VR presents purely synthetic sense-data lacking any physical reality: telepresence presents sense-data that claims to correspond to a remote physical reality." In other words, while VR is pure fantasy, telepresence is reality by proxy.

Goldberg grew up in Bethlehem, PA, and studied engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He attended Carnegie-Mellon for graduate school, where his artwork with robots began. He was hanging out with some artist friends one night and decided to try to paint a picture with the robotic arm that was part of his thesis project.

"Computer art is ultimately very sterile," he said. "With this piece, I'd render a drawing on the computer and then drive the arm to dip a brush in paint and paint. The paint would drip and run -- the results had a visceral feel and a painterly quality but it still didn't have the human touch."

In 1991, after receiving his Ph.D from Carnegie-Mellon, Goldberg became an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California. While at USC, the World Wide Web came into existence. After discovering that a robot could be attached to the Web, Goldberg and some associates buried objects in a sandbox. Each of the objects related to a 19th-century text whose title was kept secret. Web users could maneuver the robotic arm that was equipped with a camera and an air blower, to blow air into the sand and excavate objects. Then people could speculate as to the title of the text in an online log. It got 15,000 hits a day.

His latest project, the Shadow Server, is yet another exploration into physicality and that old philosophical conundrum: "What is real?" Goldberg, whose partner on this project is Bob Farzin, describes it as a WWW-based telerobotic camera obscura. It's a real lightproof box that is filled with objects. Viewers can interact with them by pressing buttons on their computer screen that activate lighting devices and return with a digital snapshot of the shadows they have cast. It could easily be made up of stored images. But Goldberg insists it isn't, although he does say he's "trying to cultivate ambiguity."

One viewer wrote in the shadow server log, "As I added more and more lighting sources, I started to wonder if a comment was being made about the media -- that is as more and more 'light' is shed on a subject less and less truth is revealed. Then I went outside and had a smoke."

Two-and-a-half years ago, Goldberg moved up to Northern California for the Berkeley teaching gig. "There's so much going on with electronic art up here, I wanted to do something that would allow people to get together and discuss things," he said. So he started a forum, "The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium."

"You try to be diplomatic coming in though, to talk about art," he said. "It's amazing how dismissive engineers are about contemporary art -- the old 'My kid could do that.' They just figure: 'If I don't understand this, it must be garbage.' It's the opposite for artists. They see an engineering text and figure, 'It must be beyond me.' But both art and engineering are symbols. To understand either of them requires years. Part of the purpose behind the lecture series is to try to build mutual respect and to have a critical forum."

The lecture series has featured Lev Manovich, who spoke on the computer as illusion machine; Julia Scher on predictive engineering and the cult of surveillance; and Hubert Dreyfus whose lecture was titled, "Kierkegaard & the Information Highway." Upcoming lectures will feature Carlo Sequin on mathematics-based sculpture, and Luc Courchesne with a lecture called "Art Making as Forging Evidence."

At present, Goldberg is working on a book with MIT Press called "The Robot in the Garden." It will include essays from philosophers, artists and engineers about what is real when you're at a distance. It's due out in 1999. I'm looking forward to it, from this distance.

For more on Ken Goldberg, check out Kenneth Baker's 1996 story, "Lost in the Cyberspace Translation."