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glimpse of an open system of theater, which allows the audience to participate in a sophisticated way in the solution of complex model con- flicts. Her system of interactive degrees of freedom draws visitors ever deeper into the space of possible alternative strategies of action and allows them to participate in an immersive path of narration—a symbiosis of virtual art and theater.
The ongoing fusion of genres—or media—that has been apparent since the beginning of the 1990s is a signature of virtual art and the technology upon which it depends is mirrored in the work of the Australian artist Jeffrey Shaw. Together with the British artist and theorist Roy Ascott, who began to publish texts on interactive computer art in the 1960s, in fact before it even existed, and the American artist and researcher Myron Krueger, whose experiments with the reactive real-time system «Videoplace» (1974) are considered the beginning of interactive art, Shaw is regarded as a pioneer of interactive art. For decades he has been particularly interested in immersion, although he has not stated this explicitly; however, the concept of
immersion pervades his oeuvre, from his early ‹inflatables,› his work «Corpocinema» (1967), to his works based on the expanded cinema idea which breaks through the limits of the cinema screen, the various versions of his classic «The Legible City» (1988), a square kilometer of virtual urban space with an architecture of letters as high as buildings that can be crossed by bicycle, his «Extended Virtual Environment,» (1993–1995), and his most recent installations, such as «Place Ruhr» (2000). Visions of future cinematography were assembled in the exhibition Future Cinema at the ZKM, which was co-curated by Shaw. His installation «Place Ruhr» not only links the genres of photography and video with virtual art, but Shaw consciously locates it in the tradition of that dinosaur of media and art history of immersion —the panorama.
Particularly global access to and exchange of images via the Internet opens up a new, data-mediated epistemology through the technique of telepresence,