If it all sounds too much, Mrs Kramlich points out that living with media art is really no different from living with fixed-image art. (The couple have works by Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys in their mock-Tudor San Francisco home.) The difference, she adds with an eye to California's electricity troubles, is that you have an on-off switch and when the images vanish, the house is an artwork of its own.
We're not exactly sure what makes these virus transistors so special, but apparently the transistors they've built out of the nano-coated strands, and sandwiched between two electrodes, are easy to switch between ON and OFF states, since they don't need to build up a charge at a lame-o capacitor before they can be switched.