Promotional Information

Oliver Grau expands notions of immersion with a comprehensive overview of artistic meditations on illusion, presence and space. Using historical and innovative media-art project examples, he offers multiple perspectives on the evolution of our world-view. No doubt this volume will be a useful resource for any serious practitioner and/or theorist engaging the merging of art, science and technology. -- Victoria Vesna, Chair, Design and Media Arts, University of California 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 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 Long established in Germany, media studies is just beginning to get hot in English-speaking countries. Grau's book makes a crucial contribution to this field by raising the bar for any future archeology of a virtual computer image. Equally at home in art history, media history, and new media art, Grau situates immersive image spaces of new media within a rich historical landscape. A must-read for anyone interested in new media, visual culture, art history, cinema, and all other fields that use virtual images. -- Lev Manovich, author of The Language of New Media

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.

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