If you don’t write for an academic audience, it can be hard to grasp just how long it takes to bring a project to market. I’m delighted to announce that Animate(d) Architecture: A Spatial Investigation of the Moving Image, a collection edited by Vahid Vahdat and published by Liverpool University Press, is now available in eBook and Hardcover. From the press blurb:

The volume examines animation from a spatial lens. It offers interdisciplinary outlooks to the role of space in animation, including in creating humorous moments in early cartoon shorts, generating action and suspense in Japanese anime, and even stimulating erotic pleasure in pornographic Hentai. Animation, in this book, is approached as a medium that can equip the designers of the built environment with a utopian scope to address our socio-political and ecological crises.

In my chapter, I describe how Disney’s dark ride model represents a kind of spatialized animation, and I further suggest it is a forgotten conceptual link between animation, the theme park, and today’s first-person gamified and virtual worlds.

I’m especially honored to be published alongside a scholar I have long-cited in my own writing, J. P. Telotte. And as with my prior publications, I enjoy executing my own illustrations. More information about the other contributors and their essays can be found at Liverpool University Press.