A guided tour through the nuanced politics of architectural illusion, »The Vatican to Vegas« takes the reader from lavish Baroque fantasies of the seventeenth century to the Electronic Baroque of today. The >scripted spaces< described by Norman Klein are punctuated with devices widely used in special effects since 1500: shocks, surprise twists, grand fakes and copies. Since its publication 2004, »The Vatican To Vegas« has emerged as a classic across many fields, from media, architecture, to the fine arts and urban planning. Its timing was ironic: Klein assumed in 2004 that the future of scripted illusion was about to radically shift. This new edition brings the ironic story up to the present, and into the digitally overwhelmed >scripted spaces< of the future.

Norman M. Klein, born in 1945, is professor in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, and the author, for instance, of 'The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory' (1997/2008) and 'The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects' (2004), the multimedia historical novel, 'The Imaginary 20th Century' (2016), 'Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales' (2006). A critic, urban and media historian, and novelist, he has written extensively on the culture and politics of Los Angeles, on cinema, and on architecture.