| Sumario: | This article provides an overview of the article published in the Volume 19, Number 1, 2004 issue of Visual Studies. Simon Cook's essay, takes a longer-term view of the interactive and hypertextual nature of computers and new media. Responding to an argument that the roots of new media's hypertextuality derive from cinema, Cook extends the sphere of influence into the 19th century to consider books and photographic archives as precursors of hypertext databases. Our graphic and visual sense of the Web page simply advances the hypertextual properties of the book, which also had periods of intense development when visuals were incorporated into its pages. Petra Gemeinboeck's essay, describes the visual construction of immersive virtual reality art from within a computer-automated virtual environment virtual reality theatre. The interactive qualities of Gemeinboeck's art and her discussion of user interaction demonstrate the qualities of immersive navigation and the potential for virtual environments to mediate self and other. Richard Levy, Peter Dawson and Charles Arnold's paper, echoes similar concerns with immersive environments though moving from art worlds to the remediation of ethnographic research. Their interest is with the potential of immersive environments for museological interpretation of archaeological sites reconstructed using data from archaeology, ethnohistory and ethnography. The visual rendering creates a sensory experience of architecture, an appreciation of the logic or process of construction and provides access to features of often remote locations.
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