Oliver Grau is Chair Porfessor for Image Science at Danube University Krems.
His books include Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Cambridge/Mass., MIT-Press 2003, Mediale Emotionen, Frankfurt 2005, MediaArtHistories, MIT-Press 2007, Imagery of the 21st Century, MIT-Press 2011. He was invited to more than 200 lectures world wide, is translated in 12 languages and received various awards.
His research focuses on the history of media art, the history of immersion and emotions and the history, idea, and culture of telepresence, genetic art, and artificial intelligence.
Grau´s book "Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion", MIT Press (2003 book of the month Scientific American), offered for the first time a historic comparison and evolution in image-viewer theory of immersion as well as a systematic analysis of the triad of artist, artwork and beholder under the conditions of digital art.
Grau has chaired various research projects in the field of media art research supported by DFG, BMBF, VW, etc., he conceived new scientific tools for Image Science/digital humanities: the Archive of Digital Art (www.virtualart.at) financed by German Research Foundation (DFG), the textplatform for the field of media art histories, which is dispersed over several disciplines (www.mediaarthistories.org) and Goettweig Graphic Print Collection Online, Austria´s largest private graphic collection that contains 30,000 works, from Duerer to Klimt, www.gssg.at.
(Source: Danube University Krems profile website)