Fellow Colleagues and Listers,
Concerning the ongoing discussion of the use of virtual imagery in human
history, this new book finds interesting ties between art history and
contemporary immersive-media art. Gibbs provides a concise
overview. Enjoy! Pete Otis
OLIVER GRAU: VIRTUAL ART: From Illusion to Immersion,
MIT Press January 2003
Review by Michael Gibbs, in: Art Monthly, March 2003.
Virtual art is all too often precisely that - almost, but not quite, art.
Much of Oliver Grau's book, especially the part dealing with immersive
virtual reality environments, is replete with reservations about whether
what he is writing about really qualifies as important art, given that it
lacks the quality of distance that is essential for critical reflection.
When one experiences a totally immersive environment one is in the image,
and so one cannot step back to gain an overview, nor is one supposed to be
aware of the illusion-creating technology used to produce the image.
Moreover, as Grau points out, many examples of virtual art are suffused
with mystical or mythological undertones that do not sit easily with the
criticality and irony that are the hallmarks of today's art. Here, at the
point where science and art overlap, it is often the science that is more
advanced. Indeed, Grau's history of illusion-producing art shows how it has
always relied on technological progress, from control of lighting
conditions to complex computer hardware and software.
As befits a thorough (and typically German) exercise in media archaeology,
Grau's story begins in antiquity, with the frescoes covering the walls of
the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii. These paintings, representing figures
participating in Dionysian rituals, offer visitors a full 360
Virtual Art - book review
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Type: discussion
Comments
Not having read Grau's book, only the review, there appears to be at least one glaring omission; L. J. M. Daguerre's diorama in Paris. (The diorama was in fact, and in short, a sort of multimedia panorama, if the use of this other term in the review is properly, albeit narrowly, understood.) Daguerre, of course, was the money and later, after Niepce's death, the mind behind the first commerically feasible photographic process, the daguerreotype. The problem with writing these sort of histories is that they draw distinct lines of inclusion and exlusion in development genealogies, problems that have become more and more evident as the history of new media has turned more philosophical and epistemological than nuts and bolts. (Anthologies published so far are pretty much enamoured by the hardware.) In some ways, titling something virtual art poses a great philosophical problem to start with, so no wonder he apparently struggles for chapters on end with various definitions – it is by defintion virtual, no?
Now you see it, now you don't.
-af