Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognised 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. 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. Grau offers not just a history of illusionary space but also a theoretical framework for analysing its phenomenologies, functions, and strategies throughout history and into the future.

About the Author

Oliver Grau is Professor for Image Science and Dean of the Department for Cultural Studies at Danube University. He is the author of Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (2003) and editor of MediaArtHistories (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

Prizes

"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 with careful analysis of both the possiblities 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* "The highly ambitious task of locating the latest image technologies within a wider art-historical context has now been accomplished." Friedrich Kittler, Humboldt University, Berlin, and author of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter "For over a decade now, Lovink has been one of the most prominent figures in cyber culture and new media worldwide. A new-media theorist, an Internet critic, an activist, an inventor of new innovative forms of net-based discourse, an organizer of ground-breaking events--remarkably, he excels at all these different roles. I think of Lovink as a network of distributed sensors: everywhere at once, he is always the first to notice new changing directions of net culture, the first to name them, and the first to offer sober and illuminating analysis. Now we are fortunate to have his brilliant dispatches from the Net front collected in one book. This is a new kind of book from a new type of public intellectual. Think of it as theory on-the-go--or as a set of help files to keep handy as you navigate the present, on- and off-line."--Lev Manovich, author of *The Language of New Media*Please note: Endorser gives permission to excerpt from quote.

Reviews

"Grau traces the lineage of virtual reality as far back as the frescoes of a villa in Pompeii. Many illustrations amplify the argument." - Scientific American, Book of the Month