No subject

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)


"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.



Quotes from the press:

"A key book -- Oliver Grau's art historical study taps into the new
virtual

image spaces." (Frankfurter Allgemeine)


"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.

(See also:
<underline><color><param>3333,3333,FFFF</param>http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=26570CB6-AB47-414B-A780

-1ECA08AAB2D3&ttype=2&tid=9214)</color></underline>

<underline><color><param>3333,3333,FFFF</param>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/104-6017318-2877562</color></underline>


--Apple-Mail-10-623786588--