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 360º vision, thus prefiguring the panoramas that were to become popular in the 19th century. The Renaissance invention of perspective was one of the technical means that allowed artists to more convincingly create the illusion of three-dimensional spaces. Baldassare Peruzzi's Sala delle Prospettive in Rome, painted in the 16th century, transformed the end wall of a room into a colonnaded portico looking onto an illusionistic view of ancient Rome. Another way of turning two into three dimensions was to add sculptured figures against a painted backdrop, a technique pioneered in the 16th century (the chapels at Sacro Monte depicting the stations of Christ's suffering), and further elaborated in Baroque church architecture before reaching its apogee in the popular dioramas and panoramas of the 19th century. Grau's account of these developments is detailed and informed by considerable research. The same goes for his history of the panorama, which deliberately sought to represent landscapes and cityscapes as spectacular illusions for the benefit of a paying public. The idea of painting a completely circular canvas in correct perspective was first patented by Robert Barker in 1787 and actually constructed a few years later. Grau observes that "the inception of the panorama was characterised by a combination of media and military history". Early panoramas served reconnaissance purposes, but their military effectiveness was short-lived and was soon overtaken by their value as propaganda. Panoramic battle scenes, such as the Battle of Sedan by Anton von Werner depicting Prussia's victory over the French in 1870, to which Grau devotes a lengthy chapter, became well-attended spectacles, ushering in an age in which manufacturing panoramas was more an industrial than an artistic process. Indeed, Anton von Werner himself never contributed a single brush stroke to the work, which was actually carried out by a team of specialist craftsmen under the direction of foreign (in this case, Belgian) investors. In a similar way, multinational capital was to transform the military inception of virtual reality a century later into a form of mass entertainment. The industrial mode of producing illusionistic or immersive experiences continued with the invention of film, which proved to be an immediate success and a major crowd-puller. Grau retells the story of the panic ensuing at the first showings of August and Louis Lumière's film of an approaching train, placing the event within the wider context of later developments such as 3D cinema and Cinerama. While some of these inventions, like the panorama itself, were to end up on the scrap heap, the urge to create fully immersive environments continued with the advent of digital simulation and computer-aided interactivity. The second half of Grau's book concentrates on the evolution of art and media since the mid-80s, when computing power became sufficiently powerful and available to enable artists to collaborate with technicians on highly complex interactive projects, often with the aid of funding from research laboratories and electronic art centres. Typical of these is Charlotte Davies's Osmose (1995), which required viewers to don a head mounted display in order to dive (almost literally) into a fusion of organic and natural imagery, which some critics have dismissed as 'virtual kitsch'. In the work of the Austro-German group Knowbotic Research, the viewer is absorbed into chaotic clouds of data streams accessed from various sources, but the result is deliberately left so abstract that interpretation becomes futile. Viewer-controlled interactivity has led in some cases to various forms of 'telepresence' in which robots or avatars interact with visitors in real time, while tele-conferencing allows people in different locations to be linked, as in Paul Sermon's Telematic Dreaming (1992) in which people can react to the projected virtual presence of another person on a real bed. Just as telepresence has a 'subhistory', so too does another fast-growing offshoot of virtual art, genetic art, which "attempts to integrate the forms, processes and effects of life into art". Virtual plants and other life forms, complete with computer-aided genetic evolution, have been modelled by digital artists, continuing the tradition of eighteenth century mechanical androids, and anticipating the current trend of 'transgenic art', which extends the power of the artist over life itself. The static nature of the painted panorama may have been replaced by the transitoriness of the image in computer-driven virtual art, but both have been and are subject to rapid obsolescence. As Grau rightly observes, process-based works are by definition unfinished and relative, which is perhaps why very little virtual art still exists in its original form. Many of its premises and interfaces, however, have been absorbed and commercialised by the games industry, which, it seems, has an equal stake in producing the illusion of controlled immersion. What Grau's fascinating archaeological investigations reveal, above all, is that illusion is nothing more than a fleeting, utopian dream, whether it be classified as art or as entertainment.
Michael Gibbs 

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