Dan: it didn’t occur to me to ask what you thought of the U.S. mediaspace to which you were exposed in Chicago! I hope you will consider blogging about it — I’d love to hear how the neon orgasm looked from outside the national imaginary (or should that be “national hallucinatory”?).

I have my curmudgeonly moments as well, though in the wake of election day I’ve largely set them aside. Your critique is valid: CNN’s charade of telepresence on Tuesday night was precisely that, a processor-intensive kabuki. At the same time, I would suggest that Yellin’s hologram merely continues a general collapsing of the graphical (animations, icons, logos, text) into the “real” (reporters in front of cameras) that has subtended the newscast form since its inception. TV news, that is, has always manifested a certain “will to composit,” blending live reporters with representations and visualizations of data and events. CNN’s experiment in holography just converts its intensively, electronically layered war room from a 2D to a 3D environment. (With Devan Goldstein’s fine paper on bullet time still on my mind, we might read CNN’s roaming camera as a spatialization strategy.)

The curious thing to me is that these simulationist extravaganzas — these virtual Taj Mahals — remain the go-to sites for reliable, indexical information about the world!