ImagePrintCritical dictionary

For the last ten years, there has been an ongoing discussion about the status of the image in art history, philosophy, and cultural studies,[i]which has gained in topicality and brisance through the advent of media art. The new media, and particularly the art realized through and with them, demand that this question be posed with new intensity and with a new quality. Currently, no other image medium polarizes the discussion about the image more radically than virtual reality. Yet what, precisely, distinguishes the images of media art from those of bygone ages?

The rapidly spreading virtual techniques have acquired influence over many and diverse areas of scientific disciplines, the majority of which lie outside the sphere of art. To attempt a closer understanding of the phenomenon of virtual realities and contribute to the theoretical debate on the so-called iconic turn or pictorial turn, [1] I attempt to trace at least in part the long and complex tradition of this image concept and to sketch its vitality and almost revolutionary character that is emerging through the potential of interaction with and evolution of images. It is imperative to leave aside approaches that are technology-centered and, instead, situate the artistic images of virtual reality within the history of art and the media, although it is necessary to treat aspects of how the latest technology of illusion functions. Regarded historically, it is possible to relativize the phenomenon of virtual reality and determine what makes it unique. Through historical comparisons, it is possible to recognize and describe more clearly analogies or innovations. This is an attempt to take stock, in a clear and level way, on the basis of art history without invoking apocalyptic scenarios, for example, as Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, [2] or Dietmar Kamper [3] have tended to do, or indulging in futuristic prophesies, of the variety associated particularly with the “California Dream”.[4]

            The project of a science of the image, in which I’m involved, deliberately pursues a policy of transgressing established boundaries of specifically “artistic images”. It is at liberty to comprise elements of Warburg’s early sketch of a science of the image based on cultural history, Panofsky’s “new iconology”, as well as the studies on vision by Norman Bryson [5] or Jonathan Crary.[6]  
Since the 1960s, discussion of the concept of image representation has expanded enormously. Starting point was the groundbreaking work of Nelson Goodman, [7] Roland Barthes, [8] and Ernst Gombrich [9]. Since then, studies and analyses of the concept of the image, which used to operate exclusively on the terrain of art history, have been undertaken in disciplines such as psychology, physiology, aesthetics, philosophy, cultural studies, visual studies, and computer science. Particularly in art history, the oldest discipline engaged with images and media, the interrogation of the concept of the image has burgeoned; interestingly, this has been in parallel to the rapid developments in the field of the new media and their image worlds[10].
Currently, to take an expression of Walter Benjamin’s, media art history has “the wind of world history in its sails”. The emerging discipline of a science of the image complements the history of the science of artistic visualization, [11] the history of the art and images of science, [12] and, particularly, the science of the image as it is pursued in the natural sciences. [13].

            Inspirations for this book are the studies on visualization in the Cartesian tradition, in Martin Jay’s expression “the ocular character of all Western culture” [14] and Guy Debord’s fundamental critique in The Society of the Spectacle.[15] However, I have drawn primarily on the theoretical discussions of interactive media art at congresses such as the Inter-Society for Electronic Art [16], SIGGRAPH [17], Ars Electronica [18], the Centre for the Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts [19], (CAiiA)/Newport, Interface [20] and many other interdisciplinary meetings.

            For several years, the dramatically changed function of images wrought by the new media has been a subject of cultural studies research. Some of the most important work in this field is by Roy Ascott [21], a visionary theoretician whose published work on interactive computer art goes back many years. At the Centre for the Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts (CaiiA-STAR), where Ascott is director, many of the most important contemporary media artists are studying for Ph.D.s [22]
The early work of Myron Krueger [23] also belongs in this canon together with the research work of Eduardo Kac [24], Machiko Kusahara [26], Simon Penny [26], Erkki Huhtamo [27], Margret Morse [28], and the overviews of immersive works edited by Mary Anne Moser [29] that commenced publication in the mid-1990s at the Banff Centre. In Japan, the research and analysis conducted by Itsuo Sakane [30], founding director of IAMAS, is of prime importance; unfortunately, very little of his work has been translated. An eloquent history of concepts of space since Roger Bacon – not of immersive image worlds – has been written by the journalist Margret Wertheim. [31]

Immersion

            Immersion is undoubtedly key to any understanding of the development of the media, even though the concept appears somewhat opaque and contradictory. Obviously, there is not a simple relationship of “either-or” between critical distance and immersion; the relations are multifaceted, closely intertwined, dialectical, in part contradictory, and certainly highly dependent on the disposition of the observer. Immersion can be an intellectually stimulating process; however, in the present as in the past, in most cases immersion is mentally absorbing and a process, a change, a passage from one mental state to another. It is characterized by diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening.

            The majority of virtual realities that are experienced almost wholly visually seal off the observer hermetically from external visual impressions, appeal to him or her with plastic objects, expand perspective of real space into illusion space, observe scale and color correspondence, and, like the panorama, use indirect light effects to make the image appear as the source of the real. The intention is to install an artificial world that renders the image space a totality or at least fills the observer’s entire field of vision. Unlike, for example, a cycle of frescoes that depicts a temporal sequence of successive images, these images integrate the observer in a 360º space of illusion, or immersion, with unity of time and place. As image media can be described in terms of their intervention in perception, in terms of how they organize and structure perception and cognition, virtual immersive spaces must be classed as extreme variants of image media that, on account of their totality, offer a completely alternative reality. On the one hand, they give form to the “all-embracing” ambitions of the media-makers, and on the other, they offer the observers, particularly through their totality, the option of fusing with the image medium, which affects sensory impressions and awareness. This is a great difference from the nonhermetic effects of illusionistic painting, such as trompe l’oeil, where the medium is readily recognizable, and from images or image spaces that are delimited by a frame that is apparent to the observer, such as the theater or, to a certain extent, the diorama, and particularly television. In their delineated form these image media stage symbolically the aspect of difference. They leave the observer outside and are thus unsuitable for communicating virtual realities in a way that overwhelms the senses. For this reason, they do not form part of this study.

            Of the two main poles of meaning of the image, representative function and constitution of presence, it is the second that concerns this study. The quality of apparently being present in the images is achieved through maximization of realism and is increased still further through illusionism in the service of an immersive effect. The image and simulation technique of virtual reality attempts to weld traditional media together in a synthetic medium that is experienced polysensorily. The technological goal, as stated by nearly all researchers of presence, is to give the viewer the strongest impression possible of being at the location where the images are. This requires the most exact adaptation of illusionary information to the physiological disposition of the human senses.[32] 

The most ambitious project intends to appeal not only to the eyes but to all other senses so that the impression arises of being completely in an artificial world. It is envisaged that this kind of virtual reality can be achieved through the interplay of hard- and software elements, which address as many senses as possible to the highest possible degree with illusionary information via a “natural”, “intuitive”, and “physically intimate” interface. According to this program of illusion techniques, simulated stereophonic sound, tactile and haptic impressions, and thermoreceptive and even kinaesthetic sensations will all combine to convey to the observer the illusion of being in a complex structured space of a natural world, producing the most intensive feeling of immersion possible. Virtual reality may not be in the headlines any longer, but it has become a worldwide research project [34]. As soon as the Internet is able, image spaces will be available online that at present can be seen only in the form of elaborate and costly installations at festivals or in media museums.

            The expression “virtual reality” [35] is a paradox, a contradiction in terms, and it describes a space of possibility or impossibility formed by illusionary addresses to the senses. In contrast to simulation, which does not have to be immersive and refers primarily to the factual or what is possible under the laws of nature, using the strategy of immersion virtual reality [36] formulates what is “given in essence”, a plausible “as if” that can open up utopian or fantasy spaces [37]. Virtual realities – both past and present – are in essence immersive. Analog representations of virtual realities appear oxymoronic when multifarious virtual spaces are viewed in sequences or when they are partially visible simultaneously. Unresolvable contradictions have the power to irritate and distress, but they can also mature into full-blown artistic concepts, as in the case of mixed realities. Immersion in the artificial paradises of narcotics, for example, as described by Charles Baudelaire [38], dream journeys or literary immersions past and present (in Multi User Dangeous {MUDs} or chat rooms) [39], refer mainly to imagination addressed through words, as expressed by the concept of ekphrasis. [40] They differ fundamentally from the visual strategies of immersion in the virtual reality of the computer and its precursors in art and media history, which are the subject of this book.

            Mimesis, in the Platonic sense, mimics. The more lasting the effect, the less abstract it is; it is able, simultaneously, to be evident in a creative sense and to represent the intelligible. [41] 
The concepts of trompe l’oeil or illusionism aim to utilize representations that appear faithful to real impressions, the pretense that two-dimensional surfaces are three-dimensional. The decisive factor in trompe l’oeil, however, is that the deception is always recognizable; in most cases, because the medium is at odds with what is depicted and this is realized by the observer in seconds, or even fractions of seconds. This moment of aesthetic pleasure, of aware and conscious recognition, where perhaps the process of deception is a challenge to the connoisseur, differs from the concept of the virtual and its historic precursors, which are geared to unconscious deception. With the means at the disposal of this illusionism, the imaginary is given the appearance of the real: mimesis is constructed through precision of details, superficial appearance, lighting, perspective, and palette of colors. From its isolated perfectionism, the illusion space seeks to compose from these elements a complex assembled structure with synergetic effects.

            In connection with the concept of mimesis, it is worthwhile to recall another, ancient image concept, which goes back to precivilized times. This is the original meaning of the German word for picture or image, Bild, with its etymological Germanic root bil: its meaning refers less to pictoriality and more to living essence; an object of power in which resided irrational, magical, even spiritual power that could not be grasped or controlled by the observer (in Ancient Greek, dia zoon graphein also comprises an element of the living), an aspect that so far has received little attention in image research.

            In spaces of illusion, the moving observer receives an illusionary impression of space by focusing on objects that move toward or away from him. The depth of a painted space, however, is experienced, or presumed, only in the imagination. Gosztonyi defines the experience of space as follows: “The virtuality of the movement must be emphasized; one can also ‘enter’ the space virtually, i.e., in thought or imagination, whereby the distances are not actually experienced but rather assumed.” [42]
The technical idea that is virtual reality now makes it possible to represent space as dependent on the direction of the observer’s gaze: the viewpoint is no longer static or dynamically linear, as in the film, but theoretically includes an infinite number of possible perspectives. The word cyberspace, coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in 1984, derives from cybernetics and space, and could be given as cybernetic space. Gibson understood cyberspace to be an array of networked computer image spaces, a matrix, which as “collective hallucination” would find millions of users daily [43]. The subculture, which rapidly grew up around the idea of virtual reality in the late 1980s, co-opted this term, which plays only a minor role in this study [44].

            In virtual space, both historically and in the present, the illusion works on two levels: first, there is the classic function of illusion which is the playful and conscious submission to appearance that is the aesthetics enjoyment of illusion [45]. Second, by intensifying the suggestive image effects and through appearance, this can temporarily overwhelm perception of the difference between mage space and reality. This suggestive power may, for a certain time, suspend the relationship between subject and object, and the “as if” may have effects on awareness [46]. The power of a hitherto unknown or perfected medium of illusion to deceive the senses leads the observer to act or feel according to the scene or logic of the images and, to a certain degree, may even succeed in captivating awareness. This is the starting point for historic illusion spaces and their immersive successors in art and media history. They use multimedia to increase and maximize suggestion in order to erode the inner distance of the observer and ensure maximum effect for their message.

            Even six-year-old children are able to differentiate between reality and “as-if worlds” [47], yet in Western art and media history there is a recurrent movement that seeks to blur, negate, or abolish this differentiation using the latest imaging techniques. It is not possible for any art to reproduce reality in its entirety, and we must remain aware that there is no objective appropriation of reality – Plato’s metaphor of the cave shows that. It is only interpretations that are decisive. This has been one of the major themes in philosophy in the early modern era: the work of Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant can also be viewed as marvelous attempts to reflect on the consequences that result from perspective, the mediation of perception and thus the cognitive process, which ultimately cannot be overcome. Further, artificiality and naturalness are also concepts of reflection. They denote not objects but views, perspectives, and relations [48]. In addition to copying it, the transformation of reality is the central domain and essence of art: the creation of reality, individual reality, collective reality. [49] Interestingly, recent findings in neurobiology propose that what we call reality is in fact merely a statement about what we are actually able to observe. Any observation is dependent on our individual physical and mental constraints and our theoretical scientific premises. It is only within this framework that we are able to make observations of that which our cognitive system, dependent on these constraints, allows us to observe. This reflection is focused on how and to what extent there have been attempts to create “reality”, virtual reality, with the means of the image in art history.

            My intention is to demonstrate the continuing presence of this image form in the history of European art, and the examples have been selected because they make the most intensive use of the illusion techniques of their time. The aim is to shed light on the visual strategies and specific functions of virtual spaces in the history of the art and media. Although hundreds of seventeenth – and eighteenth – century illusion spaces exist in the palaces and villas of Europe, to which access is difficult in the majority of cases, little research has been undertaken, and where research does exist, other questions tend to be in the foreground [50]. In particular, the transmedia continuum of their function, the enduring tendencies to enclose and immerse the observer regardless of the form of the medium, has not been recognized, and should be emphasized.