CEDAR FALLS - On the surface, Ebon Fisher's journey through art and science has been a strange one.

Look deeper, and one finds an artist striving to "find the damn great mystery in the world." Culture kills off mystery, he claims, and he's made it his mission to investigate and expose connections between humans, biology, nature, culture and the digital world.

"Transformations in the Nervepool," on exhibition through Feb. 3 at the University of Northern Iowa's Gallery of Art, shows Fisher's evolution from street artist to self-professed "media breeder" who visually seduces onlookers with a writhing culture of neurons, codes, rituals and networks.

"I'm trying to subvert science and 're-wild' it back to nature. Nor am I on art's 'side,'" confesses Fisher. " I'm trying to look at life as openly as possible from the biological to the technological - at vitality itself, whatever form it takes."

This is the largest single exhibition of his work and the first opportunity Fisher has had to see his work in chronological progression. "It's dreamlike. You know how it's said that the human body sloughs off and replaces every cell in the body every seven years? Well I feel like that - I'm not the same person, the same structure - who did these things? It's been a strange exercise for me," the artist explains.

"Ebon's work brings everything into context. Science and technology are not disconnected from the human experience, but it is here to enhance our lives. It's interesting to see how paintings and drawings, the traditional arts, have evolved into his current digital work," says Darrell Taylor, UNI Art Gallery director.

Fisher's explorations have given birth to Nervepool, a kind of digital commune where elegant diagrams and systems the artist calls Media Rituals, Zoacodes and Virtual Architecture are grown and cultivated like plants in a garden - the Hyperhive. Critics describe Fisher's organic matrix as "an allegory for graceful mingling with our Earthly ecosystems. Nervepool's Zoacodes provide an explicit language for the networks and flows of organic systems."

Outside the virtual world, Fisher convenes physical interactions such as Media Compressions in which people share various forms of media in a cross-pollinating interaction, underscoring his "larger mission of communion with biology and dynamic systems."

Projects have included life-sized architectural studies in his Brooklyn, N.Y., studio, Web television broadcasts for MIT's Media Lag and the Venice Guggenheim Museum and a 3D computer model built with graduate students at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. In 1998, Fisher set up a new digital arts program at the university.

Fisher's work has been featured in art journals and high-tech magazines, and his rites - "rhythmic layerings of cultural, electronic and biological webs" - and Web Jam, a nightlong warehouse event in 1993, have been described in national magazines ranging from Newsweek to Wired. His Web site, www.nervepool.net

As an art student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Fisher grew disgruntled by what he viewed as the "disconnect" between traditionally taught art in the classroom and "the real, everyday life people lived." He took his art to the street, painting vehicles and bus stop walls with graffiti.

The tagging was unconventional, drawn from Fisher's increasing fascination with morphing neurons and brain cells. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fisher began studying the impact of technology on culture, taught MIT Media Lab's first undergraduate class, Creative Seeing, and produced his first formal media ritual. "Viscera" married electric guitars, computer-generated images and NASA film footage of the sun with narrative by astronomers telling the story of the solar system as an intimate tribal ceremony.

Fisher's quest for a "personal hyperbiological worldview" took him to Boston and a job as scientific illustrator for Boston's Eye Research Institute. Here he staged his first multimedia ensemble, Nerve Circle, featuring musicians, dancers and a disc jockey. More Nerve Circles followed, including one that attracted police intervention and earned Fisher an eviction notice from his loft apartment.

Moving to Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, Fisher knitted together a network of artists who formed do-it-yourself galleries and gatherings, and thrived in a "living petri dish for progressive media and culture." The results revitalized the community and its creativity, making it a trendy destination for tourists and a gentrified home for Mahanttanites. Now artists like Fisher can no longer afford to live in the neighborhood.

These days, Fisher lives in the 'burbs with his wife. A musician, he's created music videos as part of Nervepool's complexities, developed the Wigglism Manifesto to "nurture the loaded logic of living, with endless reflection and a moving center," and has completed 18 screenplays he hopes to produce as a TV series or feature film.