Reviewer biography

Books

Review Articles

CDs

Events/Exhibits

Film/Video

Book Reviews Archive

Virtual Arts in History and the Present. Virtuelle Kunst in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Visuelle Strategies

by Oliver Grau. Dietrich Reimer Press, Berlin, 2001. 300 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 3-496-01230-7. Euro 30,17.

Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann,
Braunschweig School of Art,
Johannes-Selenka-Platz 1,
38118 Braunschweig,
Germany

spielmann@medien-peb.uni-siegen.de

As artists not only appropriate new technologies but in exploratory ways research, develop and sometimes 'invent' new types of media arts, such as computer, network, and software art and also merge different media (for example literature, fine arts, film, music, architecture, dance, kinetics, and so on) in complex artificial environments that tendentiously interact with or immerse the viewer/user, the traditional disciplines and most prominently Art History are challenged by the expansion of their field of study. Furthermore, the discourse of 'art' and the term 'artwork' become questionable when arts and sciences overlap in collaborative projects and where programming, software development, problem solving of hardware and mechanical issues, and the aesthetic decisions on shape and form taken together qualify for the building of the essential characteristics of a particular artwork that we sloppily speaking call a 'piece'. What exactly is all sewn together in one piece is often not obvious and sometimes the differing media that are used become less and less distinguishable. Nevertheless today's collaborative practices and their modes of synthesis are not without pre-conditions or historical parallels. To combine expertise in different fields is essential to technical media since film - a medium at the time conceived to synthesize all art forms and to offering synaesthetic pleasures. In addition, many scholars have pointed out analogies to the artist-scientist in the Renaissance who has hands-on experience of the 'science of art': geometry, optics, anatomy, and so on. Given the realm of the present diversification, the expertise needed to create art at the advanced technological level of the time (as is the case in 'virtual arts') certainly requires knowledge of more than one or two fields of discipline and science so that we are facing new dimensions of interrelationship and complexity, particularly when approaching Virtual Reality.

Firstly, the notion of virtual reality revitalizes metaphors of the merger of human and machine. Moreover, it provokes the idea of the actual realization of a human-machine-interface that would improve the impression of immersion and interactivity in simulated dataspaces. Consequently the development of art forms with immersive and interactive effects technically demands the visualization of in principle endless and multi-dimensional image 'worlds' that transform coherently. For when we look at scientific research's achievement of virtualization as developed for medical purposes and military tasks, we find that strategies of visualization play the same major role as when artists work with 3D computer graphics and motion control systems to create a 'world' as Virtual Environment, Artificial Reality, or Cyberspace. The common features concern questions of transformative images, implementation of moving images, and shifting velocities. Concurrently, the higher modes of complexity achieved in virtualization inevitably raise questions about the representational function of images and their fictional content and this refers back to debates of illusion and realism in Art History. To remind these issue were also highly disputed at the time of the advent of previous technical media, starting with photography and film, in what we nowadays would call the 'media discourse'.

The brief overview may demonstrate that an approach to come to terms with virtuality in the arts profoundly asks for comparative analysis of the phenomena of merger and of the terminology attributed to it. An interdisciplinary discussion is needed in order to discuss virtual art in its own right and to reestablish a discourse about the image that can adequately match with the transformation of its characteristics, namely through computer-based image processing. Therefore art history's approaches need to be informed by the basic parameters of media analysis in neighboring fields, most importantly cinema and media studies that have provided a set if approaches to comparatively discuss different types of images in differing media.

With regard to the importance of techniques of visualization in new media, Oliver Grau's dissertation that is published as the book "Virtual Arts in History and of the Present" courageously tries to take up the challenge to broaden the expertise of Art History so that the discussion of image and medium would match with the state of art of the technological development of visualization. The book argues historically that already in wall paintings we find examples of the visual representation of illusionist spaces that place the viewer right into the space of the represented scene and that Grau calls immersive. Applied to the contemporary understanding of virtual realities that may optionally present possible or impossible spaces but will always present what is possible according to the source code of the computer, the author differently maintains a rather metaphorical understanding of virtuality having historical and actual connotations of immersion. For him, the essential immersive quality of virtualization defines the fundamental premises of the book that are carried out in a rather positivist way. The author understands the key concept of immersion as resultant from the merger of image and media under the condition that the medium itself is illusionist. Of course, from a media studies' perspective we may argue against a concept that attributes illusionist or non-illusionist to a single medium, because we will rather refer to modes of application and say that the media images express illusionist or non-illusionist features, whereas the medium itself does not have such characteristics. But regardless of our critical stance towards the understanding of media that the book provides, Grau is right in focusing on the convergence of image and medium as the leading paradigm that helps to discuss historically differently developed models of virtual reality, panorama and fresco painting with regard to the specific parameters of immersion.

Immersion occurs, as the detailed description of many artworks proves, when the viewer is physically surrounded by the image space, such as by a series of fresco paintings covering all walls of an interior space or more prominently in the panorama. Especially where the panorama in nineteenth century is depicting real events, such as a battle scene, the visitor feels immersed into the totality of an image that, as Grau argues, produces an illusionist visual world that is perceived as absolute image. What happens when illusionist representation turns immersive is that the conscious perception of the media level and the actual materiality fades in favor of the strong bodily experience to be almost physically connected to and inside the artificial visual space. In similar ways computer-based interactive works also challenge the media border and increase the viewer's impression to directly communicate with what he/she has created with software. This happens when the viewer/user - not necessarily in a virtual reality setting - almost naturally connects to animated figures resulting from image algorithms that have 'behavior'. In the striking example of "A-Volve" by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Migonneau the level of immersion depends on the awareness of the media level and the viewer's willingness to interact with the paradigm of the machine. The close relationship between immersion and interaction is demonstrated when the book describes the viewer's/user's perception of the well-known virtual reality work "Osmose" by Charlotte Davies that intends to provoke the bodily experience of diving. Even though the physical experience with this piece demands the heavy Head Mounted Display the author identifies a 'natural interface', a term that he picks up from current debates on artificial realities and - without further discussion - relates as well to Davies' as to Sommerer's and Mignonneau's. In view of the multitude of terms that increase between the poles virtual reality and artificial life it would have been rather helpful here to have some definition of the conceptual history and signifying practices of such a contradictory metaphor. And we would also be grateful for clarification what exactly a meaningful understanding of a 'natural interface' in a virtual environment could be.

And with regard to the theoretical literature on virtuality, interactivity, and immersion that appears as very long list of titles in the bibliography it would have been reasonable in a dissertation to discuss some of the leading positions in the field. This would also have helped to better explain where the discussion about virtuality and immersion comes from and how we shall understand interactivity. For example, interactivity in the book seems to be simply understood as a creative tool that increases the more virtual reality techniques evolve. As for the concept itself there is no reference to parasocial interactivity in the television setting that is the widely discussed as building block for the further development of interactivity in virtual environments (as Margaret Morse in her book "Virtualities" states). Oddly enough, the book does not build up a theoretical framework or even a memory of its argumentation, so that we find explanations and definitions of terms and concepts spread over the descriptions of individual works and not always coherent.

Besides critical stances it is highly valuable that this historical and present time view on the phenomena of immersion, illusion, and interaction takes position in a debate on images that escalates into meaninglessness - and produces discussions of the type 'images without images'. By saying that recent technological possibilities that improve immersive effects in virtual arts should be studied within the broader context of visual strategies, Grau introduces to Art History different ways of looking at spatial 'visual effects' so that he can explain the pre-history and shifting concepts of immersion up to today's virtual reality settings. In a historical perspective the book starts with fresco paintings that cover all four walls of an interior space - the earliest example being the "Villa dei Misteri" in Pompeij -, and connects to ceiling frescos of the Baroque - where most prominently Andrea Pozzo's illusionist painting transgresses architecture in ways of a "ceiling panorama." Grau here is not interested in further discussing this prominent example with regard to the fixed viewpoint marked through a small disc in the floor which would naturally lead to the question of immersive arts position a mobile or immobile viewer. Certainly, the matter is of importance to virtual reality pieces because these allow a mobile viewer perceiving constantly moving images. Moreover, in-between the two the medium film, like Pozzo's fresco, also provides the fixed viewpoint of the immobile viewer but differently to the fresco in front of moving images.

Leaving issues of mobility and movement aside, the book's tour through painterly illusion turns to interior spaces in the Renaissance where the room's architecture is extended through painted three-dimensional columns. The argument that those visual settings connect viewer and image in ways that can be described immersive is highlighted with the panorama, another medium of stasis that nevertheless demands a limited mobility from the viewer to walk around the rotunda. The panorama serves as the 'potent' model for producing the necessary spatial illusion that immersively engages the viewer similarly to virtual reality. While the previously mentioned illusionist spaces build the pre-history to the panorama, this medium sets the parameters for the following discussion of computer-based virtual reality arts. Furthermore, the manufacturing of the panorama sheds light on the interrelationship between artist, artwork, and viewer against the background of the emergence of mass media that sets the production frame for all future media arts.

On the whole the book historically traces aesthetic concepts of virtual 'visual spaces' and connects them to the present state of interactive media arts. In doing so Grau certainly is bridging the gap between Art History's discourse on the image and recent media, what he convincingly demonstrates when discussing phenomena of Virtual Reality together with historical examples of illusionist spaces. Here, the concept of immersion becomes evident in the full range of its possible meanings and applications. While the book clearly shows that the expertise in a field like Art History that still believes to hold the master discourse about images needs to be contextualized with examples of media images that fall into quite different categories, the theoretical discourse of the book hardly merges with other disciplines. This, of course, would not matter at all if we were solely dealing with single and static images. But when we are primarily discussing moving images and mobile viewers, I will argue, that the consideration of transformative images is quite important to 'virtual arts'.

Surely, the immersive qualities in painting and panorama foreground aspects of virtual reality arts, but we can also argue that the history of film, stereoscopy, and optical toys is of the same importance to virtualization. Ignoring not only film but the larger discourse on moving images and image movement in relation to the viewer's movements seems to result from a methodological problem that the book cannot solve. While the study wants to pursue historical-systematic research in a comparative analysis, the actual outline of the chapters and the line of argument are rather following a linear and historically chronological pattern so that there is hardly space left to engage cross-references. More serious the lining up of illusionist images in fresco painting, panorama, cinema and 3D dataspace cannot deploy an overriding discourse of media specificity, as the introduction of the book promises, simply because relevant theories of photography, film, and media (to name but three) are not considered to have a say in the field of 'virtual arts'. Thus, the discussion turns inappropriate when Expanded Cinema is seen as an example of immersion, whereas the expansion rather points to multi-sensory interactivity and to intermediality, the latter a term that reads as subtitle of the book but is not discussed.

Because of missing definitions of key terms such as image and media some confusion occurs when visual media are generally dealt with under criteria of illusion. As said, this is not plausible at all and particularly not true with reference to early film where the differing practices of illusionist and anti-illusionist film coexist. While the first tends to make the medium invisible and leads to fiction and narrative cinema, the latter reveals the medium, produces different stages of realism and motivates Soviet montage film and experimental film. Although film is of minor importance to the book, the misconception of Lumi¶re's and Eisenstein's intentions shows the general perspective that Grau takes on the nature of visual media under the narrow angle of illusion. For the most part it certainly makes sense to discuss illusionist Fresco painting and panorama, but the one-sided characterization is no longer true with cinema and it is questionable if all virtual realities necessarily foster illusionist patterns. As the book primarily focuses on the tradition of illusionist images in visual spaces that foreground the idea of virtual reality but have not yet been viewed together in the theoretical debate, the prime concern with illusion is reasonably motivated. A clearer definition of terms and a more developed methodological concepts would have helped to strengthen the book's approach to introduce immersion and interaction into Art History's discourse on the image. For a further approach to the challenge of media images, surely more expertise in other fields will be needed

An extended version in English entitled "Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion" is forthcoming at MIT Press.

top