By JOHN MARKOFF

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 29 - As an actor and a founder of the politically active Electronic Disturbance Theater, Ricardo R. Dominguez is an unlikely faculty member at the nanoscience, wireless and supercomputing laboratory that opened its doors here on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, on Oct. 28.

Mr. Smarr's idea can be discerned even in the architecture of the new Atkinson Hall, which is connected via 155 fiber-optic cables to the rest of the campus and to a smaller partner laboratory 75 miles away at the University of California, Irvine, as well as to research centers around the world.

For Mr. Smarr - who as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the 1990's oversaw the development of Mosaic, the first World Wide Web browser - this synthesis of art and science is vital in light of the role he expects artists to play in designing the future.

That idea, which is anathema to some in the engineering-driven world of science and technology, influenced the thinking of the building's designers in the San Francisco office of NBBJ, the international architectural and design firm.

Artist-scientist collaborations include work being done by the neuroscientist Mark H. Ellisman and Sheldon Brown, who is in charge of the New Media Arts group at Calit2. Dr. Ellisman's group was involved in the construction of a wall-size tiled computer capable of displaying 100 million pixel images of the brain, making it possible to view vastly more information than on a standard monitor.

Natalie Jeremijenko, who refers to herself as an "artist experimenter," is a former member of the engineering faculty at Yale interested in how society interacts with and uses toys. A current project is to create a pack of "feral" robotic dogs with artificial intelligence capabilities and let them loose in a San Diego neighborhood. The robots could be assigned some socially useful function, like searching for or "sniffing out" pollution.

 The juxtaposition of digital art with next-generation science and technologies like wireless networks, biosensors and optical supercomputers gives Calit2 a degree of panache that has largely been lost in the American scientific and corporate research worlds in the face of financial cutbacks over the last decade.

Now, however, it is possible that the torch of a new technology for the 21st century will be passed to Mr. Smarr and his laboratory.

Having overseen the creation of the Web browser and watched its ensuing impact, Mr. Smarr has a good sense of the profound effect new technology can have on society.

"A society that doesn't support science is one that will be very different than the one we have known for the last 500 years," he said.

"California and the U.S. cannot rest on our laurels," Paul Jacobs said at the dedication of the Atkinson building on Oct. 28. "We need this kind of investment in infrastructure to do the kind of visionary research that will keep us competitive."

Mr. Dominguez, the political activist and actor, says he believes that Calit2 can deliver partly by bringing society closer to his artistic ideal of unifying humans with representations of humans in cyberspace.

"We have created Italy," he said. "Now all we have to do is create Italians."

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company