Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” and Zuckerberg’s Virtual and Augmented Reality for Facebook present a future of total immersion, but will we ever be able to enter such an illusory space of our imagination?

This lecture by Dr. Oliver Grau, chair professor for the Department of Image Science at Danube University Krems, Austria, will focus on the emerging relationship of MediaArtHistory, which connects the history of art, media and technology, forming an integral element of image science. Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images, often with the aim to create emotional responses. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to Antiquity, Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces and 19th century panoramas. The lecture retells art history as media history, describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of the image and relates it to interaction, interface design, telepresence and genetic images.

While Media Art has evolved into a critical field at the intersection of art, science and technology, a significant loss threatens this art form due to the rapid technological obsolescence and static documentation strategies. Addressing these challenges, the Interactive Archive and Meta-Thesaurus for Media Art Research is developed to advance the Archive of Digital Art. Through an innovative strategy of ‘collaborative archiving,’ social Web 2.0, 3.0 features foster the engagement of the international Media Art community, and a ‘bridging thesaurus’ linking the extended documentation of the Archive with other databases of ‘traditional’ art history facilitates interdisciplinary and transhistorical comparative analyses for the humanities.