Those sleek flat screens popping up on people's walls may just look like fancy televisions. A new generation of artists and gallery owners wants you to think of them as something else: an empty picture frame.

	Downloading Art A new breed of artist is creating digital work, much of which you can display on your flat-screen television or monitor. Many works can be viewed online. Here are a few of the innovators: ARTIST: Mark Amerika; www.markamerika.com TYPE OF WORK: DVD video works and Internet-based pieces such as "Filmtext" where users interact with a lonely post-apocalyptic landscape. PRICE: An edition of "Filmtext" recently sold for $10,000. ARTIST: Jim Campbell; jimcampbell.tv; www.hosfeltgallery.com TYPE OF WORK: Elaborate installations which play with memory and the experience of time. Brightly-colored pieces using LED displays. PRICE: One of two editions of the piece "Motion and Rest GBP 6" recently sold for $40,000 ARTIST: Golan Levin; www.flong.com; www.bitforms.com TYPE OF WORK: Software-based interactive works and digital performances, including "Dialtones: A Telesymphony," where the artist and collaborators created a musical piece out of the ring tones of the audience s cell phones. PRICE: An unlimited edition of "Stria" will sell for $100 at software ART space (www.softwareartspace.com) ARTIST: Mark Napier; www.bitforms.com TYPE OF WORK: Internet-based pieces -- often abstract -- in which owners can direct and change what is seen on the screen. PRICE: Shares of "Waiting Room" have been selling for $1,000 apiece. ARTIST: Casey Reas; www.groupc.net; www.bitforms.com TYPE OF WORK: Software-based works that owners can interact with using a touch screen or a wireless mouse. Pieces such as such as "Tissue" evoke living organisms. PRICE: An unlimited edition of "Tissue" will sell for $100 at software ART space (http://www.softwareartspace.com>www.softwareartspace.com)

Purveyors of a relatively new genre, so-called digital art, aim to fill that blank screen. The field includes software art, where the "art" is the computer code itself that directs the images and sounds on the screen; Internet-based collaborative works, where a group of far-flung collectors can view and play with a piece simultaneously; and DVD art that looks like more-conventional video art.

Much of the work is abstract; a piece called "Cells" by up-and-coming software artist Casey Reas looks like tiny organisms floating on the screen. In "Waiting Room," an interactive and collaborative work by artist Mark Napier, a toolbar displays various shapes, each accompanied by a corresponding sound. With a wireless mouse, owners can click on a shape, drag it into the image and help create a constantly morphing work, the collective result of everyone's input. "Waiting Room" is being sold in 50 "shares," priced at $1,000 apiece.

Digital works, the latest genre of new media art, usually are sold in limited edition DVDs. But this spring, Steven Sacks, the director of New York City's bit-forms gallery, plans to start selling lower-priced original works of software art at software ART space (www.softwareartspace.com). Prices will range from $100 for unlimited-edition works to $1,000 for numbered pieces. Buyers will get a sleekly packaged disc; limited editions will be signed by the artist.

While there are always risks to buying art, these works come with some unique problems. The collector with a Picasso on the wall doesn't need an IT department; digital-art collectors sometimes do. When Peter S. Hirshberg, a technology entrepreneur, bought several pieces of software art for his New York loft, it took some doing to get them all running on the same screen. "I had to have this real Unix geek come out and make it all work," Mr. Hirshberg says. "At one point I had the artist, the geek and the galleryist all here."

Other potential issues range from piracy -- it is much cheaper and simpler to copy software code or a DVD than a painting _ to DVD scratches. And because computer operating systems and hardware change every couple of years, there is no guarantee that you will be able to display your art a decade from now, or pass it down to your children.

This corner of the art market is still embryonic, with demand being driven in part by the falling prices and surging popularity of new TV sets and flat-screen computer monitors. Prices for the works are fairly low, in the hundreds of dollars to the low thousands.

But a few works have commanded more. Recently, Colorado-based artist Mark Amerika sold an edition of his piece, "Filmtext," to a private collector for $10,000, a price believed to be one the highest so far for an Internet-based work. The piece has a science-fiction feel; users poke around in a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape.

"Prices are not going to be very high for unique pieces because you can easily duplicate it," says Beau Takahara, founding director of ZeroOne, a Mountain View, Calif., nonprofit art and technology organization. "It is a problem video artists have had since the early '70s." But art-world experts expect prices to rise as the art form becomes more established, just as it did for photography and video.

The original works differ from a more popularized version of digital art that involves reproducing famous pieces for flat screens. Often, these amount to essentially screensavers. Beon Media Inc., a closely held Seattle company, recently launched GalleryPlayer, a service that sells, for example, Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams photographs. You can buy one image at 99 cents, or monthly subscriptions starting at $4.95.

A competing service, from Roku LLC, based in Palo Alto, Calif., sells packages of classic images by artists such as Degas and Picasso for $69.99. It is like getting posters of your favorite works from a museum gift shop, but you can choose from a huge inventory and change your display often.

By contrast, artists who design their own works are using digital technology to make a living and build legitimacy in the mainstream art world. This new generation _ including a number of artists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory _ have grown up with technology and are increasingly comfortable using bits instead of paint.

And they are having some success. Last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City bought a piece by Jim Campbell, who does large-scale electronic installations. A major show focusing on digital art recently appeared at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York.

But museum goers may not have quite the intimate relationship with the work that owners do. Mr. Hirshberg, who owns a piece of Mr. Napier's "Waiting Room," says he has been woken up in the middle of the night by the sounds of someone -- somewhere -- playing with the work. "I'm asleep and there's this racket downstairs," Mr. Hirshberg says. "Then there's the slow realization that I left the art on."