“There is no other form of art with the same tremendous potential, that of submerging us in rubbish,” explains the science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling. At the end of November Sterling addressed this issue in a four-day workshop at Fabrica, the communications research centre of Gruppo Benetton. The first answer arrived after four days of cutting, pasting, photographing, moving and measuring: in the processes created by the students of Fabrica there is no trace of programming or computers. The pieces they have come up with are Crumpled, the cover of a sketch book; Shape, a mat that automatically adapts itself to surfaces; Dis-play, a kind of giant game of chequers in which the competitors themselves move across the chequerboard; and Worm, a worm made from paper cubes that represent computer pixels. E. S.