Professor Lisa Stansbie: Meeting Notes 22 September

 

Advisory board, members roles, terms of engagement, Doodle poll, dates, models for chairing, Harvard libraries, exhibition catalogue, project visuals, maps, timelines, schedules of work, data categorisation, meta data and tagging, co-authorship, reading, future projects, meeting next summer – project ideas, Vijay Patel building, staff drawing, DMU global, travel, theory and literature, reading material, non-negotiable library time, ERC mentoring, Weinerberger, political associations, maps and layers, translation project.

Virtual Art, Oliver Grau

Over the summer I read Virtual Art: From Illusion To Immersion, an exploration of the Art History of virtual space, published in 2003. Grau takes his historical starting point from painting, in particular the birth of the 360˚ painted panorama in the 18th century. Physical panoramic spaces install the observer in the picture. One of Grau’s core themes throughout the book is perspective, perception and distance, what he describes as ‘Aesthetic Distance’. The interface is vital to this. In Grau’s view, as the interfaces of digital design become more natural and transparent, the distance of an observer to a piece of work vanishes. Without this distance, an overall view, there is a danger of misunderstanding structure and function and losing critical appraisal. “Telepresence” is at the core of this and the author writes about the “Telepistemological” implications of removing presence and distance in virtual work. Virtual and technical presence transforms spatial experience and as location connects to the physical body, inner distance and visual distance are fundamental in how human beings experience art and the world in general.



From the work I am taking in particular ideas about navigation to use in the Jerry Berman letters archive. How to allow a viewer to locate themselves in relation to the collection and to have critical distance to be able to perceive the reality of Berman’s experiences relative to each other and to wider histories from the Holodomor.