VIRTUAL ART - From Illusion to Immersion

[virtualart at culture.hu-berlin.de]

--Apologies for Cross-Posting---



VIRTUAL ART
From Illusion to Immersion  
by Oliver Grau
A Leonardo Book published by MIT Press

(January 2003, ISBN 0-262-07241-6, 7 x 9, 360 pp., 89 illus)


"Equally at home in art history, media history, and new
media art, Grau situates immersive image spaces of new media within a rich
historical landscape. A must-read for anyone interested in new media,
visual culture, art history, cinema, and all other fields that use virtual
images." 

(Lev Manovich, author of The Language of New Media)


"The highly ambitious task of locating the latest image technologies within
a wider art-historical context has now been accomplished." 

(Friedrich Kittler, author of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter)


"Dismiss Oliver Grau's new book as a German multimedia theorist's scholarly
treatise on art, and you'll miss a great read. Underneath its stald
packaging, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion puts forth the sort of
provocative insights that any Newromancer fan can appreciate." 

(WIRED, January 2003)


CONTENT: Going beyond technical and ahistorical views of media art, Oliver
Grau analyzes what is really new in media art by focusing on recent work
against the backdrop of historic developments. Although many people view
virtual and mixed realities as a totally new phenomenon, it has its
foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. The search for
illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. Oliver Grau shows
how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion and
shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum
illusion from Pompeiis Villa dei Misteri via baroque frescoes, panoramas,
immersive cinema to the CAVE. He describes the metamorphosis of the
concepts of art and the image and relates those concepts to interactive
art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and image evolution. Grau
retells art history as media history, helping us to understand the
phenomenon of immersion beyond the hype.

GRAU also examines those characteristics of virtual reality that
distinguish it from earlier forms of illusionary art and thus shows us what
is really new in media art. His analysis draws on the work of contemporary
artists and groups ART+COM, Maurice Benayoun, Charlotte Davies, Monika
Fleischmann, Ken Goldberg, Agnes Hegedues, Eduardo Kac, Knowbotic Research,
Laurent Mignonneau, Michael Naimark, Simon Penny, Daniela Plewe, Paul
Sermon, Jeffrey Shaw, Karl Sims, Christa Sommerer, and Wolfgang Strauss.
Grau offers not just a history of illusionary space but also a theoretical
framework for analyzing its phenomenologies, functions, and strategies
throughout history and into the future. 


More quotes from the field:

"Grau's Virtual Art opens the door onto a significant new approach to media
analysis by focusing in depth on a particular kind of digital art--the
attempt to create immersive environments. The combination of media
archeology and careful analysis of both the possibilities and limitations
of the impulse to put the viewer inside the artwork will make this book a
valuable resource to both practitioners and theoreticians."

(Stephen Wilson, Professor of Conceptual and Information Arts, San
Francisco State University, and author of Information Arts)


"Oliver Grau expands notions of immersion with a comprehensive overview of
artistic meditations on illusion, presence and space. Using historical and
innovative media-art project examples, he offers multiple perspectives on
the evolution of our world-view. No doubt this volume will be a useful
resource for any serious practitioner and/or theorist engaging the merging
of art, science and technology."

(Victoria Vesna, Chair, Design and Media Arts, University of California,
Los Angeles) 


Quotes from the press:

"A key book -- Oliver Grau's art historical study taps into the new virtual
image spaces."  (Frankfurter Allgemeine)

"The scope ranges far beyond analogue and digital image techniques; this is
more than a piece of media archaeology." (MEDIENwissenschaft)

"Grau's analysis enriches the current debate on media art and virtual
worlds by providing an historical perspective." (Der Tagesspiegel)

"The parallels revealed are astounding." (Sueddeutsche Zeitung)



Oliver Grau is a new-media art historian and lectures at the
Department of Art History, Humboldt University in Berlin. He is a
visiting professor at the Kunstuniversity Linz and is head of the
German Science Foundation project on Immersive Art in Berlin, also he
is developing the first international data base resource for virtual
art. He published widely on VR-art and lectured in Europe, Japan, Brasil
and the US. Oliver Grau is an elected member of the Young Academy of the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) and the Leopoldina. His
research focuses on the history of illusion and immersion in media and art,
the history of the idea and culture of telepresence and telecommunication,
genetic art, and artificial intelligence.

(For more information:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=26570CB6-AB47-414B-A780
-1ECA08AAB2D3&ttype=2&tid=9214)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/104-6017318-2877562


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