Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (review)

Virtual reality is revolutionary! The world has never seen anything like it! It will change everything!

Well, no; such manifestos of futurity now clang with a retro quaintness. As the gushing pronouncements of virtual reality's newness have slowed to a trickle, here to put some needed scholarly perspective on its bloated boasts is Oliver Grau's Virtual Art: From Immersion to Illusion. In search of a deeper history of technology, Grau employs art history, media history, and visual culture to provide an archaeology of "immersive" images—specifically, those that utilize 360-degree spaces. From ancient Roman frescoes to nineteenth-century panoramas to recent digital art, these encompassing environments share certain rhetorical strategies, seeking to enclose viewers within the fabric of the image itself.

By creating a prehistory of contemporary interactive technologies, Grau provides necessary grounding for virtual reality's exaggerated claims of originality. Proceeding chronologically, he covers a lot of territory in order to consolidate his assertion that virtual reality has historical precedents dating as far back as antiquity. The book first offers a whirlwind tour of precomputer "virtual" spaces, starting with Pompeii's Villa dei Misteri and jumping forward to fifteenth-century Italy, trompe l'oeil, stereoscopes, 3-D film, and military headtracking. A comprehensive chapter on Anton von Werner's 1883 panoramic depiction of the Franco-Prussian War, The Battle of Sedan, demonstrates Grau's contention that immersive spaces are specially suited for propagandistic aims. "Like the majority of battle panoramas, [it] aimed to 'educate' through a powerful model—not of democratic thinking, but of unquestioning obedience" (p. 110). Throughout the hurtle across centuries, some of the relevant critical theory's greatest hits make cameos: Foucault's panopticon, Benjamin's aura, Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, McLuhan's symbiosis, Virilio's speed. Some of this is poorly integrated into the argument, as Grau veers between cursory name-dropping and plodding rehashes of by now familiar concepts.

The second half of the book offers extended investigations into contemporary computer-generated art projects, including works by Knowbotic Research, Agnes Hegedues, Daniela Alina Plewe, Charlotte Davies, Maurice Benayoun, Ken Goldberg, and Jeffery Shaw. Grau offers a fresh take on how artists utilize advancements such as head-mounted displays, user interfaces, and CAVEs. He also touches on the artistic avatars of other pivotal developments, such as telepresence, artificial intelligence, and genetic alterations.

Grau does not stress the connections between early illusions and today's virtual environments. Rather than forced equivalences, he lets rich resonances emerge, especially regarding the remarkable parallels between the military implications and mad profiteering of both panoramic and digital art. Grau is skeptical of what he calls "salvation through technology" (p. 283), and instead pays attention to the economic and material preconditions of image making: from the physical labor of panorama construction to the necessary bandwidth and teams of code writers of streaming animation. This keeps him from overstating the social significance of this art: "they are still images, when all is said and done, no more, but also no less" (p. 308).

Grau further pushes into the political and ethical implications of virtuality, asking how immersion alters our understanding of the phenomenology of looking. Can models of critical distance be offered up by illusionistic spaces, or do they promote coercive and authoritarian visions? While Grau tries to maintain a dialectical approach—understanding that virtuality could posit both acquiescence and resistance—he sometimes draws a rather stark contrast between manipulation and "democratic" viewing, not acknowledging the possibility of complex interstitial terms like skeptical immersion or complicit distance (such is the stance, perhaps, of the cynic).

Virtual Art lays a solid foundation for further explorations, even as some promising elements are underdeveloped due to Grau's focus on the fine arts. Why, if Grau discusses the artists' desire for an "all-seeing eye," are state and corporate surveillance not mentioned? This narrow context also precludes talking about video games—surely today's most pervasive and influential immersive space, particularly on-line, graphic, role-playing games...