Is virtual, digital?

Digital media as well as the technology behind it is evolving, even they way we as humans look at it and behave or interact with it is changing.

we have always wanted to recreate the world and give our own view, our on window on how we see the world within our imagination through artisic means. from cave men using simblos to tell a story, artists using colour and prespective to give an oppnion and film editing and bringing mithical cretures to life.

diferent forms of digital media are conglomerating one example of this is in america artists are mergeing the idea of a static wallpaper to become animated in expensive restraunts to create a emotion.

we want to be submersed and be in control of our surroundings, in meny ways this can be seen in how the human species chooses to kill and destroy and be surrounded by cold concreate. but this is not enough we want to experience things we may not have an opotunity to in our own lives and create fauls realities in which we are in control and within the centre.

examples of this are all over the place from the caveut, even though this hase been around for a while it looks deeply emersive.

however even without the technology being there first attempts at bringing this to the masses has started with project natel. this attempts at following human emotions

at first this technology looks well beond its time and bringing it to a multimedia divise such as the xbox 360 has huge implications to home life and the entertainment industry.

this simplification of digital media almost seems as if we are constructing too much and getting away from the real. but to what extent is this bad if we can make something better why not? If we print a digital image does it stop being virtual – or does it exist now in a physical AND a virtual way?

Oliver Grau in his book “Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion” (a recommended text on this module) says that while virtual reality is often viewed as a totally new phenomenon (and by that I mean late 20^th century onwards) these “immersive” techniques have been around and utilised by artists throughout history. Grau’s work is comparative and historical and examines how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and realism. He does this by tracing the history of the image through to the present day and examining how the immersive techniques of the ancients continue to impact on the aesthetics of New Media.

fact of the matter is even if it is just a photograph of an event it cannot help to be constructed even though the “artists touch” can be more easly hidden, the photographer chose what to point the camera at. the truth, is not, it is only a representation and as such can be viewed sepereatly from then on to the real life occurence.

Seems strange to think that artists working before the birth of Christ could have been preoccupied with immersive concepts, let alone interactivity or virtual reality as we know it today. But if we replace the words virtual or digital or immersion with illusion then maybe we can get a bit more of a handle on these techniques.

street artists Kurt Wenner and Julian Beever go to town with chalk and murals

So Grau is, in a way (as is Manovitch – see his introduction to The Language of New Media) saying that digital/virtual and traditional have exactly the same purpose – to create illusion – to give us, the viewer the opportunity and sensation of experiencing an alternate reality – and, we can argue that this is one of the primary functions of art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_art

Finally I’d like to leave you with a quote from Lev Manovitch’s book The Language of New Media.

Whose Vision is it? It is the vision of a computer, a cyborg, an automatic missile. It is the realistic representation of human vision in the future, when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed from noise. It is the vision of a digital grid. Synthetic computer generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality but a realistic representation of a different reality.

ALSO READ THIS AT WWW.FUTURECHO.CO.UK/BLOG

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