It’s certainly been a while since I’ve posted here. And with good reason! I’ve been quietly shepherding a book project to completion over the past nine months along with my co-editors Gregory Turner-Rahman (my colleague at University of Idaho) and Vahid Vahdat (Washington State University).

This three-volume collection of essays from Carnegie Mellon University ETC Press examines the virtual beyond the headset. Here you will find multiple, sometimes unexpected entry points to virtuality—theme parks, video games, gyms, pilgrimage sites, art installations, screens, drones, film, and even national identity.

Each volume is available separately as PDF, ePUB, and print-on-demand:

Book One: When Worlds Collide

Book Two: The Myth of Total Virtuality

Book Three: Senses of Place and Space

The project began in the summer of 2020 and at long last went was released on December 15, 2022. We’re super proud of this collection which links ongoing discussions in the humanities, film, game studies, architecture, and design disciplines under the aegis of what “virtual” means in a socio-spatial context. As our press blurb states:

Contemporary virtual reality is often discussed in terms of popular consumer hardware. Yet the virtual we increasingly experience comes in many forms and is often more complex than wearable signifiers. This three-volume collection of essays examines the virtual beyond the headset. Virtual Interiorities offers multiple, sometimes unexpected entry points to virtuality—theme parks, video games, gyms, pilgrimage sites, theater, art installations, screens, drones, film, and even national identity. What all these virtual interiorities share are compelling cultural perspectives on distinct moments of environmental collision and collusion, liminality, and shifting modes of inhabitation, which challenge more conventional architectural conceptions of space.

A Journey from Total Cinema to Total World

My own chapter in Virtual Interiorities appears in Book Three and is an expanded version of an article I published this past year in the latest issue of Disegno—The Journal of Design Culture. That article was chosen as the lead piece for the issue's theme Total Cinema: Film and Design which seeks to interrogate French film theorist André Bazin in new ways. Disegno—The Journal of Design Culture is published by the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary.

In addition to writing and co-editing, I designed the book covers with Greg. He provided the imagery and I supplied the typography and layout.

One particular challenge which was very rewarding was having control over the internal typography and layout of the book. ETC uses the Pressbooks platform for electronic and print-on-demand formatting. There are some basic templates to choose from which are styled using CSS 4 and rendered by an HTML to PDF engine called Prince. By extensively modifying that code, I was able to customize every class of type in the book, and even control positioning on the page throughout the layout.

This was extremely useful for front and tail matter which required extensive visual hierarchy. I had never used CSS to such detailed extent before, and certainly never in page layout for print. It was a lot of fun.

Since this is very much an image blog, also here are the illustrations I created to accompany the article and subsequent chapter.

Bazin used the Olympic Theater of Vincenza as his example of how the architecture of the stage functions as an internal world to keep it isolated from reality outside.

Within the themed environment Bazin’s spatial construct of the theater folds in on itself. Tourists are called “guests” by Disney because we have been invited by the cast onto a collapsed, common stage.

The game engine is explicitly cinematic: the operational metaphor is a virtual “camera.” Bazin’s mask is here called the view frustum, which represents the camera’s field of vision—the region of the virtual world which will appear on screen.

StageCraft is the combination of a Volume set covered in LED panels with live Unreal game engine content. The LED surfaces not only display content, they also provide realistic lighting with adjustable color.

Bazin’s inexorable segregation of film and stage was two-fold with his fixation on the spatial characteristics of each and then on how those aspects formulate and facilitate the relationship between audience and performer. What Bazin could not foresee was how media would shift from passive to active, and how theater and cinema would become a new, single medium of participatory interaction.

So pleased and proud that Virtual Interiorities is now a reality! More information about the contributors and their essays can be found at the project’s website.