[Nettime-bold] book announcement--Grau

[David Weininger <dgw@MIT.EDU>]

I thought readers of the NETTIME-L might be interested in this book.  For 
more information, please visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262072416/  Thank you!

Best,
David

Virtual Art
>From Illusion to Immersion
Oliver Grau

Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has 
its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the 
search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this 
book Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion 
and immersion. 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 virtual reality beyond 
the hype.

Grau shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce 
maximum illusion. He discusses frescoes such as those in the Villa dei 
Misteri in Pompeii and the gardens of the Villa Livia near Primaporta, 
Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces, and panoramas, which were the most 
developed form of illusion achieved through traditional methods of painting 
and the mass image medium before film. Through a detailed analysis of perhaps 
the most important German panorama, Anton von Werner's 1883 "The Battle of 
Sedan," Grau shows how immersion produced emotional responses. He traces 
immersive cinema through Cinerama, Sensorama, Expanded Cinema, 3-D, Omnimax 
and IMAX, and the Head Mounted Display with its military origins. He also 
examines those characteristics of virtual reality that distinguish it from 
earlier forms of illusionary 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.

Oliver Grau is Lecturer in Art History at Humboldt University, Berlin, 
Associate Professor at the Kunst Universaet Linz, and leader of the German 
Science Foundation's project on immersive art.

"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

7 x 9, 360 pp., 89 illus., cloth, ISBN 0-262-07241-6

A Leonardo Book

______________________
David Weininger
Associate Publicist
The MIT Press
5 Cambridge Center, 4th Floor
Cambridge, MA  02142
617 253 2079
617 253 1709 fax
http://mitpress.mit.edu

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