[Air-l] Virtual Art - book review

[Pete J. Otis]

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