Virtual art

Virtual art is a term for the virtualization of art, made with the technical media developed at the end of the 1980s (or a bit before, in some cases). These include human-machine interfaces such as visualization casks, stereoscopic spectacles and screens, digital painting and sculpture, generators of three-dimensional sound, data gloves, data clothes, position sensors, tactile and power feed-back systems, etc. As virtual art covers such a wide array of mediums it is a catch-all term for specific focuses within it. Much contemporary art has become, in Frank Popper's terms, virtualized.

Definition

Virtual art can be considered a post-convergent art form based on the bringing together of art and technology, thus containing all previous media as subsets. Sharing this focus on art and technology are the books of Jack Burnham (Beyond Modern Sculpture 1968) and Gene Youngblood (Expanded Cinema 1970). Since virtual art can consist of virtual reality, augmented reality, or mixed reality, it can be seen in other aspects of production such as video games and movies.