The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places

This collection of essays explores the history, implications, and usefulness of phenomenology for the study of real and virtual places. While the influence of phenomenology on architecture and urban design has been widely acknowledged, its effect on the design of virtual places and environments has yet to be exposed to critical reflection. These essays from philosophers, cultural geographers, designers, architects, and archaeologists advance the connection between phenomenology and the study of place. The book features historical interpretations on this topic, as well as context-specific and place-centric applications that will appeal to a wide range of scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The ultimate aim of this book is to provide more helpful and precise definitions of phenomenology that shed light on its growth as a philosophical framework and on its development in other disciplines concerned with the experience of place.

Foreword

Introduction

1. The Inconspicuous Familiarity of Landscape

2. Landscape Archaeology in Skyrim VR

3. The Efficacy of Phenomenology for Investigating Place with Locative Media

4. Postphenomenology and "Places"

5. Virtual Place and Virtualized Place

6. Transactions in virtual places: Sharing and excess in blockchain worlds

7. The Kyoto School Philosophy on Place: Nishida and Ueda-John

8. Phenomenology of Place and Space in our Epoch: Thinking along Heideggerian Pathways

9. Norberg-Schulz: Culture, Presence and a Sense of Virtual Place

10. Heidegger’s Building Dwelling Thinking in terms of Minecraft

11. Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty, and Questions for Augmented Reality

12. The Place of Others: Merleau-Ponty and the Interpersonal Origins of Adult Experience

13. "The Place was not a Place": A Critical Phenomenology of Forced Displacement

14. Virtual Dark Tourism in The Town of Light

Erik Champion is Professor of Cultural Visualisation in the School of Media Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Australia. He is the author of Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Visual Heritage (2015) and Playing with the Past (2011).