The ETC Press is proud to announce the release of the Virtual Interiorities book series, edited by Dave Gottwald, Gregory Turner-Rahman, & Vahid Vahdat.
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.
When Worlds Collide explores the ongoing present continuum between the virtual and the physical. Each essay here pointedly addresses that more and more of our spatial experiences are not conceived of architecturally, and that a variety of mediated environments are now situated squarely between what we inhabit and what we see.
The Myth of Total Virtuality sets aside more common real/unreal spatial dichotomies in the literature to reinforce that the virtual is inherently an experience and not a representation. Each chapter examines a distinct experiential mode, whether within the built environment, an interactive digital world, or within film.
Senses of Place and Space steps beyond environments to look more closely at inhabitation, time, non-space, and placelessness. Each piece gathered in this final volume touches on how we exist—or might exist—in emerging virtual constructs, as well as how those constructs shift our perceptions through fluidity, pervasiveness, and altered vantages.
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