Oliver Grau

Although many people view virtual reality as a modern phenomenon, it has its foundations in a history of immersive images. The search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. This text shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion.

From Illusion to Immersion

Virtual Art

visuelle Strategien

Virtuelle Kunst in Geschichte und Gegenwart

Scholars from science, art, and humanities explore the meaning of our new image worlds and offer new strategies for visual analysis. We are surrounded by images as never before: on Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube; on thousands of television channels; in digital games and virtual worlds; in media art and science. Without new efforts to visualize complex ideas, structures, and systems, today's information explosion would be unmanageable. The digital image represents endless options for manipulation; images seem capable of changing interactively or even autonomously. This volume offers systematic and interdisciplinary reflections on these new image worlds and new analytical approaches to the visual. Imagery in the 21st Century examines this revolution in various fields, with researchers from the natural sciences and the humanities meeting to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and impact of the image in our time. The contributors explore and discuss new critical terms of multidisciplinary scope, from database economy to the dramaturgy of hypermedia, from visualizations in neuroscience to the image in bio art. They consider the power of the image in the development of human consciousness, pursue new definitions of visual phenomena, and examine new tools for image research and visual analysis.

Imagery in the 21st Century

Leading scholars take a wider view of new media, placing it in the context of art history and acknowledging the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in new media art studies and practice. Digital art has become a major contemporary art form, but it has yet to achieve acceptance from mainstream cultural institutions; it is rarely collected, and seldom included in the study of art history or other academic disciplines. In MediaArtHistories, leading scholars seek to change this. They take a wider view of media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history. Their essays demonstrate that today's media art cannot be understood by technological details alone; it cannot be understood without its history, and it must be understood in proximity to other disciplines—film, cultural and media studies, computer science, philosophy, and sciences dealing with images. Contributors trace the evolution of digital art, from thirteenth-century Islamic mechanical devices and eighteenth-century phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, and other multimedia illusions, to Marcel Duchamp's inventions and 1960s kinetic and op art. They reexamine and redefine key media art theory terms—machine, media, exhibition—and consider the blurred dividing lines between art products and consumer products and between art images and science images. Finally, MediaArtHistories offers an approach for an interdisciplinary, expanded image science, which needs the "trained eye" of art history. Contributors Rudlof Arnheim, Andreas Broeckmann, Ron Burnett, Edmond Couchot, Sean Cubitt, Dieter Daniels, Felice Frankel, Oliver Grau, Erkki Huhtamo, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Machiko Kusahara, Timothy Lenoir, Lev Manovich, W.J.T. Mitchell, Gunalan Nadarajan, Christiane Paul, Louise Poissant, Edward A. Shanken, Barbara Maria Stafford, and Peter Weibel

MediaArtHistories

Inge Hinterwaldner

At the beginning of the 21st century, new forms and dynamics of interplay are constituted at the interfaces of media, art and politics. Current challenges in society and ecology, like climate, surveillance, virtualization of the global financial markets, are characterized by hybrid and subtle technologies. They are ubiquitous, turn out to be increasingly complex and act invasively. New media art utilizes its broad range of expression in order to tackle the most urgent topics through multi-sensorial, participatory, and activist approaches. This volume shows how media artists address, with a political lens, the core of these developments critically and productively. With contributions by Elisa Arca, Andrés Burbano, Derek Curry, Yael Eylat Van Essen, Mathias Fuchs, Jennifer Gradecki, Sabine Himmelsbach, Ingrid Hoelzl, Katja Kwastek, José-Carlos Mariátegui, Gerald Nestler, Randall Packer, Viola Rühse, Chris Salter.

Strategies in Contemporary New Media Art

Retracing Political Dimensions

Marcus A. Magnor

Olga Sorkine-Hornung

Christian Theobalt

Create Genuine Visual Realism in Computer Graphics Digital Representations of the Real World: How to Capture, Model, and Render Visual Reality explains how to portray visual worlds with a high degree of realism using the latest video acquisition technology, computer graphics methods, and computer vision algorithms. It explores the integration of new capture modalities, reconstruction approaches, and visual perception into the computer graphics pipeline. Understand the Entire Pipeline from Acquisition, Reconstruction, and Modeling to Realistic Rendering and Applications The book covers sensors for capturing 3D scenes, including regular cameras, wide-angle omnidirectional cameras, active range scanners, and plenoptic (multi-viewpoint) cameras, as well as fundamental algorithms for processing the imagery, such as stereo correspondence and 3D structure and motion recovery. It describes 3D modeling techniques, from generic object models (such as 3D meshes) to more domain-specific models (such as human shape and motion models). The book also discusses how techniques, including image- and video-based rendering, meet speed and realism requirements. Overcome Challenges in Your Own Research Experiments This book is both an accessible introduction to the emerging research of real-world visual computing and a practical guide that shows you how to start implementing frequently encountered methods.

How to Capture, Model, and Render Visual Reality

Digital Representations of the Real World

Professor for Image Science and Dean of the Department for Cultural Studies Oliver Grau

In "MediaArtHistories," leading scholars take a wider view of new media art, placing it against the backdrop of art history and acknowledging the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in new media art studies and practice.

The digital revolution fundamentally changed how cultural heritage is created, documented, analyzed, and preserved. The book focuses on this transformation’s impact. How must museums and archives meet the challenges of digitally generated cultures and how does the digital revolution influence traditional object collection, research, and education? How do digital technologies and digital art and culture affect our interaction with images? Leading international experts from various disciplines break new ground. Pioneering interdisciplinary research results collected in this book are relevant to education, curators and archivists in the arts and culture sector and in the digital humanities.

Oliver Grau

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