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Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (review)
- Common Knowledge
- Duke University Press
- Volume 9, Issue 3, Fall 2003
- p. 544
- Review
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Rent from DeepDyveCommon Knowledge 9.3 (2003) 544
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Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 416 pp.
Homo ludens at his computer allows himself to be immersed in virtual reality, and there are many sophisticated ways of plunging us into an artificial but wholly realistic ambience. There is not much new in this situation, and Grau takes us from Roman rooms decorated all round with paintings down through nineteenth-century panoramas that entertained our great-grandfathers with all-round images of antiquity and great battles. But it can be more than the oeil that is tromped, by now, and our understanding is becoming involved in ways that require perhaps more than the art-historical to explain and give warnings. We now look at realistic images, in photos or on screen, without knowing to what extent they have been electronically adjusted. Now the camera can and does lie, and we must expect soon to be introduced to innocently natural visual environments that we may not as quickly, or ever, recognize as other than reality. The old trompe l'oeil was easier to fathom. Are we are in danger of losing control of visual truth completely?
John Boardman
Sir John Boardman, Lincoln Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology Emeritus at Oxford University, is editor of the Oxford History of Classical Art and the author of, most recently, The History of Greek Vases and The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity.
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