What is virtual art? Never before has the world of images around us changed so fast as over recent years, never before have we been exposed to so many different image worlds, and never before has the way in which images are produced changed so fundamentally. ... With the advent of new techniques for generating, distributing, and presenting images, the computer has transformed the image and now suggests that it is possible to ‘‘enter’’ it. Thus, it has laid the foundations for virtual reality as a core medium of the emerging ‘‘information society.’’
Virtual Art
ReplyDeleteFrom Illusion to Immersion
by Oliver Grau
What is virtual art? Never before has the world of images around us changed so fast as over recent years, never before have we been exposed to so many different image worlds, and never before has the way in which images are produced changed so fundamentally. To an unprecedented degree, so many utopian expectations are intertwined with so much skepticism. The scale of recent and current encroachment of media and technology into the workplace and work processes is a far greater upheaval than other epochs have known, and, obviously, it has also affected large areas of art. Media art, that is, video, computer graphics and animation, Net-art, interactive art in its most advanced form of virtual art with its subgenres of telepresence art and genetic art, is beginning to dominate theories of the image and art. We are experiencing the rise of the computer-generated, virtual spatial image to image per se, to images that appear capable of autonomous change and of formulating a lifelike, all- embracing visual and sensory sphere. As yet, digital art still exists in a state of limbo, rather like photography before Stieglitz. The evolution of media of illusion has a long history, and now a new technological variety has appeared; however, it cannot be fully understood without its history. With the advent of new techniques for generating, distributing, and presenting images, the computer has transformed the image and now suggests that it is possible to ‘‘enter’’ it. Thus, it has laid the foundations for virtual reality as a core medium of the emerging ‘‘information society.’’
ReplyDeleteImmersion is undoubtedly key to any understanding of the development of the media, even though the concept appears somewhat opaque and con- tradictory. Obviously, there is not a simple relationship of ‘‘either-or’’ be- tween critical distance and immersion; the relations are multifaceted, closely intertwined, dialectical, in part contradictory, and certainly highly dependent on the disposition of the observer. Immersion can be an intel- lectually stimulating process; however, in the present as in the past, in most cases immersion is mentally absorbing and a process, a change, a passage from one mental state to another. It is characterized by diminish- ing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involve- ment in what is happening.
ReplyDeletehttp://mitpress2.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262072416chap1.pdf
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