Oliver Grau
Chair Professor for Image Science a.D., Academia Europaea. More than 350 lectures and keynotes at conferences worldwide, including Olympic Games culture program and G-20 Summit.
Grau's “Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion”, MIT Press 2003 (Book of the Month Scientific American) is with approx. 3200+ citations internationally the most quoted art history monography since the year 2000 (Google Scholar/H-Index), it received 90+ reviews. It offered for the first historic evolution in image-viewer theory of immersion and a systematic analysis of the triad of artist, artwork and beholder in digital art.
He has received several awards and his publications are translated in 15 languages. His main research is in histories of media art, immersive images, art and emotion, the history of telepresence, artificial life and digital humanities.
Grau was founding director of the MediaArtHistories Conference Series, (Banff 2005, Berlin07, Melbourne09, Liverpool11, Riga13, Montreal15, Krems/Vienna17, Aalborg19, Venice23, Colombia25, Helsinki27). The volume MediaArtHistories, MIT Press 2007, received 50+ international reviews. "Imagery in the 21st Century", MIT-Press 2011 opened the field of Image Science. Recently: Museum and Archive on the Move (2017), Digital Art under the Looking Glas (2019) and Retracing Political Dimensions (2021)
He conceived new Digital Humanities tools for image science and directed the project "Immersive Art" of the German Research Foundation (DFG) developing the first international archive for digital art (ADA, since 1998) funded by DFG, FWF & bmbwf. Since 2005 Grau was also head of the of the Goettweig Graphic Print Online-Collection, Austria's largest private collection with 30.000 works, from Duerer to Klimt www.gssg.at.
Grau developed new international curricula: MediaArtHistories MA, Image Science, Digital Collection Management, the EU supports the MediaArtsCultures Program with 5.5 Mio. Euro. 2005 Grau was elected member of the Young Academy of the BBAW & Leopoldina, 2015 he was elected into the Academia Europaea, 2014 he received a doctor h.c., in 2016 a symposium in honor of his research was held in Tel Aviv and 2019 he received the Science Award of L. Austria.
Address: Vienna / Wachau / Berlin
Grau's “Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion”, MIT Press 2003 (Book of the Month Scientific American) is with approx. 3200+ citations internationally the most quoted art history monography since the year 2000 (Google Scholar/H-Index), it received 90+ reviews. It offered for the first historic evolution in image-viewer theory of immersion and a systematic analysis of the triad of artist, artwork and beholder in digital art.
He has received several awards and his publications are translated in 15 languages. His main research is in histories of media art, immersive images, art and emotion, the history of telepresence, artificial life and digital humanities.
Grau was founding director of the MediaArtHistories Conference Series, (Banff 2005, Berlin07, Melbourne09, Liverpool11, Riga13, Montreal15, Krems/Vienna17, Aalborg19, Venice23, Colombia25, Helsinki27). The volume MediaArtHistories, MIT Press 2007, received 50+ international reviews. "Imagery in the 21st Century", MIT-Press 2011 opened the field of Image Science. Recently: Museum and Archive on the Move (2017), Digital Art under the Looking Glas (2019) and Retracing Political Dimensions (2021)
He conceived new Digital Humanities tools for image science and directed the project "Immersive Art" of the German Research Foundation (DFG) developing the first international archive for digital art (ADA, since 1998) funded by DFG, FWF & bmbwf. Since 2005 Grau was also head of the of the Goettweig Graphic Print Online-Collection, Austria's largest private collection with 30.000 works, from Duerer to Klimt www.gssg.at.
Grau developed new international curricula: MediaArtHistories MA, Image Science, Digital Collection Management, the EU supports the MediaArtsCultures Program with 5.5 Mio. Euro. 2005 Grau was elected member of the Young Academy of the BBAW & Leopoldina, 2015 he was elected into the Academia Europaea, 2014 he received a doctor h.c., in 2016 a symposium in honor of his research was held in Tel Aviv and 2019 he received the Science Award of L. Austria.
Address: Vienna / Wachau / Berlin
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Videos by Oliver Grau
online since 1999, scientific work since 1992.
As a pioneer in the field of Media Arts research, the ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (ADA) has documented the rapidly evolving field of digital art since 1999. This research-oriented overview of works at the intersection of art, science, and technology has been developed in cooperation with international media artists, researchers and institutions as a collective project.
EXPANDED CONCEPT OF DOCUMENTATION
Since todays digital artworks are processual, ephemeral, interactive, multimedia-based, and fundamentally context dependent because of their different structure, they require a modified, or "expanded concept of documentation." We ascribe high importance to artistic inventions like innovative interfaces, displays or software.
Books by Oliver Grau
At the beginning of the 21st century, new forms and dynamics of interplay are constituted at the interfaces of media, art and politics. Current challenges in society and ecology, like climate, surveillance, virtualization of the global financial markets, are characterized by hybrid and subtle technologies. They are ubiquitous, turn out to be increasingly complex and act invasively. New media art utilizes its broad range of expression in order to tackle the most urgent topics through multi-sensorial, participatory, and activist approaches. This volume shows how media artists address, with a political lens, the core of these developments critically and productively.
Frieder Nake, George Legrady, José R. Alcalá Mellado /Beatriz Escribano Belmar, Anne-Marie Duguet, Howard Besser, Giselle Beiguelman, Wendy Coones, Sarah Kenderdine, Marianne Ping-Huang, Raphael Lozano Hemmer, Annet Dekker, Janina Hoth, Laura Leuzzi, Diego Mellado, Oliver Grau, Goki Miyakita/Keiko Okawa, Sabine Himmelsbach, Francesca Franco, Patricia Falcão.
Digital art challenges archiving, collecting and preserving methods within and outside of gallery, library, archive and museum (GLAM) institutions. By its media, art in the digital sphere is processual, contextual, modular and ephemeral, and its creative process is collaborative. From artists, scholars, technicians and conservators – to preserve this contemporary art is a transdisciplinary task.
This book brings together leading international experts from digital art theory and preservation, digital humanities, collection management, conservation and media art
histories. In a transdisciplinary approach, theoretic and practice-based research from these stakeholders in art, research, education and exhibition are presented to create
an overview of present preservation methods and discuss demands and opportunities for the future. Finally, the need for a new appropriate museum and archive infrastructure is shown to preserve the art of our time.
About the Author"
Papers by Oliver Grau
at the intersection of art, science and technology, however, a
significant loss threatens this art form due to rapid technological
obsolescence and static documentation strategies. This talk will
give an outline for research, documentation and preservation of
digital art by: a) developing international archive-research
infrastructures, similar to those already available in the natural
sciences, b) contributing to the development of infrastructures
with museums, which are interested in bringing the art of our time
into their collections through concerted networks of scholarly and
mostly technological expertise. In this way relatively small units,
museums, can also deal with the very demanding challenge. The
Archive of Digital Art (ADA) www.digitalartarchive.at addresses
these issues through an innovative strategy of ‘collaborative
archiving’, social Web 2.0, 3.0 features foster the engagement of
the international Media Art community, web 3.0 elements are
integrated through a ‘bridging thesaurus’ linking the extended
documentation of ADA with other ‘traditional’ art history
databases to facilitate interdisciplinary and trans-historical
comparative analyses. ADA informs a needed concerted museum
network, to collect, exhibit and preserve digital art forms.
Programmers working on the ISEA, SIGGRAPH and FILE online archives have been collaboratively developing a system to link information about the people and art events documented in their respective archives to each other. This initiative will extend to include the Archive of Digital Art and Ars Electronica archives, as well as other archives, once the prototype is completed. This panel will discuss the challenging process of developing interfaces, building APIs, and working with wikidata as well as the process of
analyzing, sanitizing, authenticating and modifying databases containing information about people and new media art events.