Contemporary Spatial Regimes and the Evolution of Cinematic Subsumption View Digital Media

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Dave Gottwald,  Gregory Turner-Rahman  

We argue that our contemporary built environment has been overtaken by the power of the moving image. This cinematic subsumption began in early Hollywood and now spans our gamified and virtual worlds. Gottwald and Turner-Rahman see this evolution as a progression of spatial regimes. The Filmic regime describes the co-mingling of art direction and architecture and the influence of set design on constructed spaces. Disneyland, the sui generis contemporary theme park model, marks the debut of the Thematic regime at midcentury, in which spaces are cohesively planned as transmediated, multisensory experiential design using storyboards. The Electronic regime of video games and now virtual reality take elements from the prior regimes to produce compelling entertainment with complex environments. All has now culminated in game engine technology—software for creating hyperreal worlds—which introduces our current regime, the Holistic. A number of industries, from urban planning to infrastructure and movie production itself, now utilize such engines. Yet this regime’s holism is neither gestalt nor an emergent property of some kind. What is revolutionary about the game engine is that it is a tool for virtual environmental production and consumption. The conceptualization construct is itself the very environment experienced by the player. It is in essence both “the dreamer and the dream.” In this presentation Gottwald and Turner-Rahman consider the ramifications of these successive spatial regimes and comment on potential futures for the design methodologies of our environments—built, virtual, and the growing liminality between.