This is a journey through the lavish special-effects environments from 1550 to the present. It indicates how the Renaissance and early Baroque artists pioneered the interactive, the cinematic and even the digital.

The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation and Self is the first edited collection focused on the subject of the themed space. Twelve authors address a range of themed spaces, including restaurants, casinos, theme parks and other spaces like airports and virtual reality ones. The text is organized into four sections-theming as authenticity, theming as nation, theming as person and theming as mind.

In a Las Vegas casino fashioned after the Vatican, author Thomas Carlyle is as good as dead. Swilling a mortal dose of alcohol, he will perish among the grotesque patrons of Vatican City, Las Vegas as they pursue an elusive jackpot token called The Godhead. Carlyle unwittingly bumbles through corporate mafia intrigue as Vatican City's management, the Medici Crime Family, plots to enslave all the casino patrons to dreams of eternal wealth. As the night deepens and the forces of Vegas evil threaten to rob human existence of all nonmaterial significance, Carlyle dreams a final reckoning that will bring the Medici Crime Family and all of Vatican City's managerial clergy to justice in a shocking cinematic twist.

Las Vegas—the name evokes images of divorce and dice, gangsters and glitz. But beneath it all is a sordid history that is much more insidious and far-reaching than ever imagined. The Money and the Power is the most comprehensive look yet at Las Vegas and its breadth of influence. Based on five years of intensive research and interviewing, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal the city’s historic network of links to Wall Street, international drug traffickers, and the CIA. In doing so, they expose the disturbing connections amongst politicians, businessmen, and the criminals that harness these illegal activities. Through this lucid and gripping indictment of Las Vegas, Morris and Denton uncover a national ethic of exploitation, violence, and greed, and provide a provocative reinterpretation of twentieth-century American history. Now this neon maelstrom of ruthlessness and greed stands to not as an aberrant “sin city,” but as a natural outgrowth of the corruption and worship of money that have come to permeate American life.

While on a visit to the United States, Pope Pius XIII is kidnapped by a terrorist cell calling itself the Soldiers of Islam. If the United States and its allies do not meet their demands, they will execute the pope. So when FBI Specialist Shari Cohen is called to duty to track down the terrorist cell responsible, she learns that she is not alone. Deep behind the Vatican walls a secret order dispatches a clandestine op group of elite commandos known as the Vatican Knights. Their mission: bring the pope back alive. As Cohen and the Knights work in tandem they uncover a White House conspiracy involving high-ranking members on Capitol Hill. When she begins to get too close to the truth about the pope's kidnapping, she becomes the target of indigenous forces trying to keep the conspiracy safe. However, in order to get to her they must go through the Vatican Knights.

A guided tour through the magical world of illusions, this book takes the reader from lavish Baroque fantasies of the 17th cent. to the Electronic Baroque of today. We journey from architectural illusion in 1580 to the ¿trompe l¿oeil¿ of Las Vegas casinos. Klein takes us from Piranesi¿s labyrinths to the mazes of new computer software, from scrolling panoramas that staged the horror at Gettysburg to the special effects on cinema screens today. The real power in this world of fakery rests with whoever controls the illusion -- be it the pope, the pres., the imagineer, the designer, or the studio exec. ¿Special effects are not only a barometer for politics, myths of identity, and econ. relations, but also a parallel for understanding where our civilization may be headed next.¿ Ill.

Readers who appear to be lost in a storyworld, members of theatre or cinema audiences who are moved to tears while watching a performance, beholders of paintings who are absorbed by the representations in front of them, players of computer games entranced by the fictional worlds in which they interactively participate – all of these mental states of imaginative immersion are variants of ‘aesthetic illusion’, as long as the recipients, although thus immersed, are still residually aware that they are experiencing not real life but life-like representations created by artefacts. Aesthetic illusion is one of the most forceful effects of reception processes in representational media and thus constitutes a powerful allurement to expose ourselves, again and again to, e.g., printed stories, pictures and films, be they factual or fictional. In contrast to traditional discussions of this phenomenon, which tend to focus on one medium or genre from one discipline only, the present volume explores aesthetic illusion, as well as its reverse side, the breaking of illusion, from a highly innovative multidisciplinary and transmedial perspective. The essays assembled stem from disciplines that range from literary theory to art history and include contributions on drama, lyric poetry, the visual arts, photography, architecture, instrumental music and computer games, as well as reflections on the cognitive foundations of aesthetic illusion from an evolutionary perspective. The contributions to individual media and aspects of aesthetic illusion are prefaced by a detailed theoretical introduction. Owing to its transmedial and multidisciplinary scope, the volume will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: cultural history at large, intermediality and media studies, as well as, more particularly, literary studies, music, film, and art history.

The Icon Project argues that the transnational capitalist class mobilizes two forms of iconic architecture--unique icons recognized as works of art, notably designed by global starchitects (such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid); and typical icons copying elements of unique icons--to promote the same ideological message: the culture-ideology of consumerism.

Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an ‘anti-tour’ of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. In this new edition, Norman Klein examines new models for erasure in LA. He explores the evolution of the Latino majority, how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life, the impact of collapsing infrastructure in the city, and the restructuring of those very districts that had been ‘forgotten’.

A strikingly original, beautifully narrated history of Western architecture and the cultural transformations that it represents Concrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shape-shifters. In an inspired refashioning of architectural history, Edward Hollis recounts more than a dozen stories of such metamorphosis, highlighting the way in which even the most familiar structures all change over time into "something rich and strange." The Parthenon, that epitome of a ruined temple, was for centuries a working church and then a mosque; the cathedral of Notre Dame was "restored" to a design that none of its original makers would have recognized. Remains of the Berlin Wall, meanwhile, which was once gleefully smashed and bulldozed, are now treated as precious relics. With The Secret Lives of Buildings, Edward Hollis recounts the most enthralling of these metamorphoses and shows how buildings have come to embody the history of Western culture.