From Technological To Virtual Art

Frank Popper traces the development of immersive, interactive new media art from its antecedents through today's digital, multimedia, & networked art.

An overview of the art historical antecedents to virtual reality and the impact of virtual reality on contemporary conceptions of art. Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book, Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. 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 virtual reality beyond the hype. Grau shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum illusion. He discusses frescoes such as those in the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii and the gardens of the Villa Livia near Primaporta, Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces, and panoramas, which were the most developed form of illusion achieved through traditional methods of painting and the mass image medium before film. Through a detailed analysis of perhaps the most important German panorama, Anton von Werner's 1883 The Battle of Sedan, Grau shows how immersion produced emotional responses. He traces immersive cinema through Cinerama, Sensorama, Expanded Cinema, 3-D, Omnimax and IMAX, and the head mounted display with its military origins. He also examines those characteristics of virtual reality that distinguish it from earlier forms of illusionary 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.

Emerging new technologies such as digital media have helped artists to position art into the everyday lives and activities of the public. These new virtual spaces allow artists to utilize a more participatory experience with their audience. Digital Media and Technologies for Virtual Artistic Spaces brings together a variety of artistic practices in virtual spaces and the interest in variable media and online platforms for creative interplay. Presenting frameworks and examples of current practices, this book is useful for artists, theorists, curators as well as researchers working with new technologies, social media platforms and digital culture.

Learn how to use digital technologies to provide a rich new entry-point for art students to make meaning, express their thoughts, and visualize their ideas. Through the lens of artistic development, this book offers a rich scope and sequence of over 50 technology-based art lessons. Each lesson plan includes the art activity, learning level, lesson objective, developmental rationale, list of materials, and suggested questions to motivate and engage students. The authors’ pedagogical approach begins with inquiry-based exploratory activities followed by more in-depth digital art lessons that relate to students’ interests and experiences. With knowledge of how technology can be used in educationally sound ways, educators are better equipped to advocate for the technological resources they need. By incorporating technology into the art classroom—as a stand-alone art medium or in conjunction with traditional studio materials—teachers and students remain on top of 21st-century learning with increased opportunities for innovation. Book Features: Guidance for technology use in the K–12 art curriculum, including specifics for adopting sequential strategies in each grade.Cost-effective strategies that place teachers and students in a position to explore and learn from one another.Developmental theories to help art teachers and curriculum designers successfully incorporate new media.Engaging digital art lessons that acknowledge the role technologies play in the lives of today’s young people.Novel approaches to art education, such as distance learning, animation, 3D printing, and virtual reality.

Produced as part of the Art and Virtual Environment Project conducted at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Banff, Canada from 1991 to 1994.

This open access book details the relationship between the artist and their created works, using tools such as information technology, computer environments, and interactive devices, for a range of information sources and application domains. This has produced new kinds of created works which can be viewed, explored, and interacted with, either as an installation or via a virtual environment such as the Internet. These processes generate new dimensions of understanding and experience for both the artist and the public’s relationships with the works that are produced. This has raised a variety of interdisciplinary opportunities and issues, and these are examined. The symbiotic relationship between artistic works and the cultural context in which they are produced is reviewed. Technology can provide continuity by making traditional methods and techniques more efficient and effective. It can also provide discontinuity by opening up new perspectives and paradigms. This can generate new ideas, and produce a greater understanding of artistic processes and how they are implemented in practice. Tools have been used from the earliest times to create and modify artistic works. For example, naturally occurring pigments have been used for cave paintings. What has been created provides insight into the cultural context and social environment at the time of creation. There is an interplay between the goal of the creator, the selection and use of appropriate tools, and the materials and representations chosen. Technology, Design and the Arts - Opportunities and Challenges is relevant for artists and technologists and those engaged in interdisciplinary research and development at the boundaries between these disciplines.

In this first book-length study of the internationally renowned Canadian artist Char Davies, Laurie McRobert examines the digital installations Osmose and Ephémère in the context of Davies' artistic and conceptual inspirations. Davies, originally a painter, turned to technology in an effort to create the effect of osmosis between self and world. By donning a head-mounted display unit and a body vest to monitor breathing and balance, participants are immersed in 3D-virtual space where they interact with abstract images of nature while manoeuvring in an artificial spatial environment. Char Davies' Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality explores spatiality through a broad scope of disciplines, including philosophy, mythology, biology, and visual studies, in order to familiarize the reader with virtual reality art - how it differs from traditional artistic media and why immersive virtual art promises to expand our imaginative horizons. This original study provides us with an important exposition of two of Char Davies' acclaimed projects and an exploration of the future impact of digital virtual art on our worldviews.

This book explores the ways in which artists use technology to create different perceptions of time in art in order to reflect on contemporary relationships to technology. By considering the links between technology, movement and contemporary art, the book explores changing relationship between temporality in art, art history, media art theory, modernity, contemporary art, and digital art. This book challenges the dominant view that kinetic art is an antiquated artistic experiment and considers the changing perception of kinetic art by focusing on exhibitions and institutions that have recently challenged the notion of kinetic art as a marginalised and forgotten artistic experiment with mechanical media. This is achieved by deconstructing Frank Popper’s argument that kinetic art is a precursor to subsequent explorations in the intersections between art, science and technology. Rather than pandering to the prevailing art historical assumption that kinetic sculpture is merely a precursor to art in a digital culture, the book proposes that perhaps kineticism succeeded too well, where movement has become a ubiquitous element of the aesthetic of contemporary art. If, as Boris Groys has recently suggested, installation has become the dominant mode of art in the contemporary age, then movement in real time with the viewer is used to aestheticise and explore the facets of our peculiar time.