Michals, Arthur Tress, and Joel-Peter Witkin. A simi-
lar development can be traced in Japan, with photo-
graphic artists like Hatsutaro Horiuchi, Yoichi
Midorikawa, Akira Sato, and Shisui Tanahashi who
in their VR work pay tribute to the prints of the late
seventeenth century master Katsushika Hokusai.
German and Austrian artists like Bernhard and
Anna Blume, Sigmar Polke, and Arnulf Rainer intro-
duced parapsychological effects into VR through
their work. William Wegman transferred human
behavior to his Weimaraner dogs, and Cindy Sher-
man depicted herself in roles conventionalized by
movie stills and female stereotypes, both utilizing a
good deal of VR to make real their imaginations.
The late 1970s saw a specific Dutch tradition evol-
ving from the works of Paul de Nooijer who had
begun with hand-coloured photomontages of over-
stretchedroomstakenwithextremewide-angle
lenses. Rommert Boonstra, Teun Hocks, Gerald
van der Kaap, and Henk Tas were exhibited under
the brandfotografia buffa, which perfectly describes
their witty scenes. All of them were intrigued by the
commercial photography of that era with its use of
projected background screens, as in wedding photo-
graphy or in portraiture. Also in the 1970s, baby
boomers seemed to remember their childhood plea-
sures in creating model railroad landscapes or doll
houses, and table-top photography began to form a
new base of VR. Mac Adams, Jo Ann Callis, James
Casebere, Benno Friedman, Barbara Kasten, Frank
Majore, Laurie Simmons, and others mixed all forms
of VR constructions to re-integrate their private
memories and obsessions in their artistic practice.
Their fabrications were successful transformations
of the routines of everyday life into virtual, inacces-
sible spaces. A final example of this tradition is the
work of the German artist Thomas Demand who
takesimagesfromtelevisionshowsornewspapers
and reconstructs the spaces in full-scale models
made of wood and paper, has them photographed,
and exhibits theses photographs in 1:1 print size.
The 1980s saw the use of computers to create or
alter photographic imagery and explode the myth of
the medium’s ability to capture the ‘‘truth’’ once and
for all. Nancy Burson melted portraits of politicians
into each other, thus dissolving their differences.
Lynn Hershman had her head changed into a cam-
era, Matthias Wa ̈hner copied himself into famous
newspaper photographs, and Alba d’Urbano had
her skin transferred onto a suit. Most of these artists
came from video backgrounds and used still photo-
graphy in combination with computer imagery for a
movie-like VR that set the framework in the 1990s
for manipulation of the human body: Inez van
Lambsweerde exchanged front and rear parts of the
body whereas Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher
closed all bodily orifices, thus explaining the new
media universe within humans. Parallel to the the-
ories of Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec that
postulate sending the human species into retirement
by having extremely intelligent robots do all the
work, these artists transmute the human body into
god-like entities that no longer need to communicate.
Foreshadowing the cloning of human beings, Keith
Cottingham had his beautiful, identical boys fixed
photographically in his seriesFictitious Portraits.
The works shown in the seminal 1996 exhibition of
VR in photography such as Cottingham’s,Photogra-
phy After Photography, relied heavily on a develop-
ment that had been parallel to the fabrication and the
human transformation as well. With the advent of
the personal computer, the worlds of movies and
games began to merge and form a continuum. Special
effects were used in film production, and any success-
ful movie was accompanied by a computer game. In
the 1990s, this development reversed itself by having
movies made after successful games. This develop-
ment spread rapidly with the increasing use of the
internet from the mid-1990s on, creating new forms
of VR and thus influencing the arts—photography
among them. Semi-robotic figures with mythical or
superheroic character attributes were dubbed Avatars
after the Indian goddesses,and their physical appear-
ance reflected fantasies that had been promulgated by
Pop Art and Pop music alike.
The spaces of VR games and settings had their
own genealogies in either science fiction literature or
film and advertising photography. Be it arcade or
computer games, the backgrounds of rallies and
races, of combat scenes, or jump-and-run joys always
refer to reality by dint of a certain amount of photo-
graphic realism. Simulation games like SimCity or
1602 rely on aerial views as captured in military
photography, and mystery games use the effects of
landscape photography. Best-selling games of the
1990s like Myst, The 7th Guest, or The 11th Hour
would not be possible without American landscape
photography and its VR use as seen in the work of
Jerry Uelsmann or Emmet Gowin. Performance and
music groups like The Residents create a complete
virtual world in their work by a mixture of charac-
ters, stages, musical pieces, and dramatic effects;
when the listener is in the midst of their CD-ROM
appearances he has nearly no trace back to reality
except for pinching his own arm.
VR has become a realm of the internet by the
creation of digital cities, interactive online games,
and similar activities. Meanwhile, these develop-
ments have returned to everyday life in form of
architectural designs and object shapes; little isVIRTUAL REALITY