I guess it makes sense to start a conference about blogging with a blog post about blogging—hello you beautiful Reclaim Open 25 folks! Let’s face it, blogging is a blogger’s favorite topic, right? And these days I’ve been thinking about what it means for blogging to transmogrify (it’s Halloween season, after all) into something else. Most often a blog is the fodder for a book, which makes total sense given the textual base and the general sense that blogging is always a work-in-progress—in my case always becoming something legible 🙂 But I never was all that interested in writing books because it seems like a lot of work, and I’m already holding on for dear life with keeping up with this here blog.
But after a breakdown a couple of years ago (they come every so often for the bava) I was looking for something to hold off the black dog hounding my psyche. To put this in some context, it was late 2023 in Italy and we were still slowly emerging from COVID. The prospect of re-integrating into anything resembling a sociable society took significant effort. Here in Trento numerous shops in the city went bust leaving many available for let. The cultural center was even more of a ghost town than usual, add to that my own extended darkness from working alone for years in a light-challenged basement and it’s no wonder things came to a head.
Image credit: Laura Lezza/Getty Images as seen on BBC article “Covid 2020: Italy’s much-loved landmarks fall into silence” (article linked)
While struggling through this moment, one of the hopeful ideas that emerged in conversation with folks like Maren Deepwell, Bryan Mathers, and Tim Owens was getting out of the basement and into the world. Knowing there were plenty of spaces available in downtown I started looking for a studio to work from as a means to separate home and work a bit more. But more than that, I needed something akin to what Tim and I had in Fredericksburg with what was first CoWork and then Reclaim Arcade to channel some creative energy. You have no idea how rewarding it can be to build a 1980s video store. And while this blog has been the best creative outlet for me over the last 20 years, in the wake of COVID and a tentative release from the grips of a deep depression I felt the need to build something physical.
Image of the bava.studio storefront from early days when there were still bars on the windows 🙂
That is the how and why bava.studio came to life. In December of 2023 I signed a lease for a small space with the idea of ultimately making it self-sustaining (this is still a work-in-progress, like the blog 🙂 ). But the idea, as it took shape in my head, was not so much to have an office, but to transform the bava blog into a physical space. Not one unbounded by the internet, but something very much bounded by the definite geographic and cultural context in which it exists. I wanted bavatuesdays to become an actual space people can enter in Trento that allows for wonder and conversation around media and culture of all kinds (at least all kinds of bad American pop culture on hand).
Most importantly, like this weblog, I wanted there to be no cost associated with the experience—at least for them. This is where my favorite part of the space emerged: creating a window display/diorama that bucks the traditional approach of showing off the goods to be bought and sold. With each diorama we’re creating a “post,” if you will, that tries to capture the magic of certain moments in a film that folks might connect with. It’s a message in a bottle for any passerby to potentially discover and, hopefully, engage with. I understand the real limits of the diorama being scenes from 70s and 80s US horror films, but the experiment is young yet and the ultimate dream is to have folks from the community build displays that move beyond any specific interests. This would be an act of cross pollination and “true” sharing that we’ve not yet achieved, but hope springs eternal in the bava breast.
The build-out for the bav-o-rama
Looked at from one point of view bava.studio is simply an office where I go to work somewhat regularly, but from another it’s an attempt to try and make material connections with a community I’m still very much an outsider to—like any new blogger jumping in the web water for the first time. The joy of this blog has been all the connections and real-life friends it’s provided over the years as we commune over ideas—and certainly not always agreeing in that communion. The bava has made me rich as kings when I think about the people it’s brought into my life. The move to Italy ten years ago has resulted in linguistic and cultural challenges that were far greater than I originally foresaw. So rather than continuing to rest on those blogging “laurels” or basking in the glory days of “Web 2.0,” the studio is an attempt to port the sense of community this blog has provided into a different format for a very different context.
I am not sure how successful it will prove in the long run, but since last October/November, when we finally got the space built out and the first diorama up and running, we’ve been on a bit of a roll. We started with the “Something to Tide You Over” scene from George Romero’s Creepshow and about six months later re-created the hallway in which the Grady sisters greet Danny.
Just this past week we debuted the most recent diorama, a scene of Michael Meyers emerging from behind a bush and then quickly disappearing. It’s one of the early, creepy moments from the original 1978 Halloween and it’s so fresh I haven’t even blogged it yet, but you can get a sense of its workings from the short video below.
In fact, the diorama was just one part of the equation. After a year of trying to navigate the grey zone that is Italian bureaucracy we finally held our first event: the Halloween Haunted Arcade. You can read more about the specifics of that amazing event, but the idea was to convert the space into an escape room/arcade for the evening and invite folks to enjoy the experience free of charge. It was a blast, and I’ll have much more to write about that anon, but for now you can see a live walk-through of both the diorama and the haunted arcade as part of the Reclaim team’s Halloween stream.Â
Anyway, I guess the whole point of this post might simply be a reminder, at least for myself, that as replicant Roy Batty tells Sebastian in Blade Runner while struggling with his own synthetic place in a near future dystopia: “we’re not computers, Sebastian, we’re physical.” Not only does his distinction between being a computer and physical make him somehow more “human,” but this sense of the product of computing crossing over into the world in human form highlights another brand of struggle emerging in our moment between what’s even human anymore. That said, we all live in the world until we don’t.
The various events over the last years (amongst which the consolidation of the web into a few for-profit platforms) can make many of us feel lost and alone—less than human? But I believe the desire for real connection and the need to carve out a space, if only for a moment, to try and exist outside the demands of capital is not only important, but dare I say essential and life-affirming. There has been a long history on this blog of proclaiming we should “Make art, dammit!” -but what happens when the blog itself transforms into the art you make and becomes a physical instantiation of and in the world you want to exist? Who made who?! Is that some kind of blog apotheosis? We’re not computers, people, we’re physical. Make art, dammit!
I missed the conversation over at the Reclaim Open 2025 site but wanted to connect about this post. I hadn’t been keeping up on what you’ve been doing recently but I did watch the Reclaim Halloween show where you walked through the Halloween Haunted Arcade, and it was incredible! So great to be able to read this post and understand how it all got started. I’m glad you were able to find a space and do such cool things with it.
I love the idea of bringing the blog into the physical world! I (and others!) frequently go the other direction, taking the physical into the digital (like photos, or blogging about a physical book or an in-person event). The idea of how to take a gif or a poem or an audio clip into the physical world by shaping space somehow is cool to think about. I mean, we do it sometimes with drawing maybe but doing things in 3D is even more inspiring!
Hi Christina,
Thanks for commenting here, the post of record 🙂 Glad you liked the Halloween haunted Arcade, it was pretty fun. I obsessed over the diorama for a good two weeks, but they always feel great when they are done, much like a blog post. A young kid here in Trento, Riki, did a lion’s share of the work for the haunted arcade, and he did an absolutely bang-up job. I will write more about it soon, but the whole thing was the fist step in actually giving the space some life.
The conceit of brining the blog into the physical world is a bit tenuous, I am sure, given it depends on being able to rent a space, build it out, have things like arcade games to furnish it, etc. There’s a lot of assumptions there, but apart from that the idea of a sense of community in these public storefronts, rather than always, only businesses, has made it powerful for me. It’s a small, fairly insignificant intervention—but something nonetheless. Now to make it sustainable, that’s the real goal.