[spectre] Oliver Grau: VIRTUAL ART, new at MIT Press

[Oliver Grau]

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)



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 - images of art and science - 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, telepresence, biogenetic art
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 art 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 like 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.


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.

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


********************************
DR. OLIVER GRAU
Kunsthistorisches Seminar
Humboldt University Berlin
Dorotheenstr. 28; 10117 Berlin
fon: +49 (0)30 2093-4295 (direct)  - 4288 (secr.)
Fax: +49 (0)30 2093-4209
Oliver.Grau@culture.hu-berlin.de

www.arthist.hu-berlin.de/arthistd/mitarbli/og/og.html
www.diejungeakademie.de
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