Whereas the rhetoric of new media at the turn of the millennium stressed the evolution from ‘seeing’ to ‘being’, artists who were most involved in the early stages of virtual reality have moved from the overoptimistic and perhaps almost hubristic notion of ‘being’ as an existential condition of virtual reality, to a far more realistic, humble and ecologically oriented notion of ‘being-in-common’. This contribution looks at two artists in particular – Char Davies and Gary Warner – and the focus of their current work.