VIRTUAL ART From Illusion to Immersion by Oliver Grau A Leonardo Book published by MIT Press (January 2003, ISBN 0-262-07241-6, 7 x 9, 360 pp., 89 illus) "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) "Dismiss Oliver Grau's new book as a German multimedia theorist's scholarly treatise on art, and you'll miss a great read. Underneath its stald packaging, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion puts forth the sort of provocative insights that any Newromancer fan can appreciate." (WIRED, January 2003) CONTENT: Going beyond technical and ahistorical views of media art, Oliver Grau analyzes what is really new in media art by focusing on recent work against the backdrop of historic developments. Although many people view virtual and mixed realities as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. The search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion and shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum illusion from Pompeiis Villa dei Misteri via baroque frescoes, panoramas, immersive cinema to the CAVE. 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 immersion beyond the hype. GRAU also examines those characteristics of virtual reality that distinguish it from earlier forms of illusionary art and thus shows us what is really new in media 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. Quotes from the press: "A key book -- Oliver Grau's art historical study taps into the new virtual image spaces." (Frankfurter Allgemeine) "The parallels revealed are astounding." (Sueddeutsche Zeitung) Oliver Grau is a new-media art historian and lectures at the Department of Art History, Humboldt University in Berlin. He is a visiting professor at the Kunstuniversity Linz and is head of the German Science Foundation project on Immersive Art in Berlin, also he is developing the first international data base resource for virtual art. (See also: http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262072416/qid%3D1045778075/302- 9340608-2856063 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=26570CB6-AB47- 414B-A780 -1ECA08AAB2D3&ttype=2&tid=9214)