With all apologies to Belinda Carlisle, what if blogging, not love, were a place on Earth? That’s what hit me as an idea for a presentation at the Irish Learning Technology Association’s annual EdTech conference in early June while walking to get my afternoon coffee last week. The conference theme is “Digital Learning from How to Who,” with a focus on exploring “Who was, is, and should be the people of your/our Edtech community?” This is a somewhat unique question for me because, while most of my work has been online for 20 years (thanks to this here blog), my physical context has shifted dramatically from working with an awesome team at a small liberal arts college in Virginia to working for a distributed hosting company from a small city in Northern Italy — completely outside the English-speaking higher ed scene. Add to that a few years of some serious COVID lockdowns, and the “freedom” of the online world had increasingly become a Zoom-driven prison house.*
Creepshow‘s “Something to Tide You Over” was the first bav-o-rama
And while I did spend much of the early part of COVID helping Timmmmyboy design and build an arcade, I was still 4,000 miles away on an island in the Alps. So, as the lockdown started to ease and Trento Centro had more empty storefronts than occupied ones, I decided to get out of the basement and into the physical world. While part of the motivation was a search for daylight, the other piece was returning to a sense of open that always attracted me most: an open door. A space in the middle of town that was not about selling or buying; moreover, it needed to have something of an open-door policy so that people could drop in and ask, “what the hell is this place?” That really appealed to me. Not only would it force me to work on my languishing Italian language skills, but more importantly to become a part of the community I live in. For years, I’d been using my job and the affordances of the web as an excuse to exile myself from the reality I inhabited — like a tourist overstaying his welcome.
Someone posted about The Shining diorama on social media, but we’re not just computers, Sebastian, we’re physical
So, the conceit for what has become known as bava.studio (although it has many possible names like bavacade, RGB, The Consolate, etc.) was trying to imagine my blog as a physical space. What if a storefront were not transactional, but rather wonder-full? For me, the key was having a space that engages the public in some kind of playful dialogue. This was really the idea behind the window-based diorama, or what has come to be known as bav-o-rama. I had an early blog post, as soon as I started leasing the storefront, titled “Space is the Place”, wherein I’m thinking through what the space might be, and all the elements were there from the start: it being a physical outgrowth of the blog; free from the transactional logic that increasingly rules the social web (and has long defined our physical downtown spaces); and, possibly most important, creating a space that engages the local community outside the limiting, viral logic of social media.
John Carpenter’s Halloween diorama promoting the Halloween haunted Arcade Event
“Promoting” the space with next to no social media† has been somewhat slow-going, but I think that is also dependent on who it is you want to include in the experiment. The “who” here is key, because I think social media—and the goal of going “viral”—erases any particularity of the who into a faceless they. To quote Edmond O’Brien from The Wild Bunch, “Who the hell is they?” I work sporadically at the space throughout the week (mainly afternoons) and keep the door open when not writing or on a call. Most of my interactions are person-to-person, and I think those are the most powerful for what I’m trying to do. I’ve said it again and again: I think the real reason for doing this is so that some 10- or 12-year-old kid who sees the space can reflect back on it 10 or 20 years in the future and say something along the lines of, “Remember that crazy store in Trento that sold nothing and had a window with movie scenes and a full 1980s arcade? What the fuck was up with that guy?” That said, even in the face of my attempt to limit the space from simply becoming “viral” clickbait, at least one of my kids and his friend think it’s a disservice not to have an Instagram or TikTok account. They may not be wrong according to a certain logic.But I’m not sure the space would be well-served as a social media-driven destination (which to be fair, is already assuming a lot). Some idealist in me is still set on the idea of this space being a wonder-filled surprise for the unknowing, and a the best kept local secret for the knowing.
What’s more, we’ve had a pretty good turnout for the two low-key events we ran without social media. It was all OG flyers, stickers, and word-of-mouth promotion — I kinda think that’s how it should be. The actual bav-o-rama is a advertising blog post of sorts, that not only alludes to the event but also attempts to capture the imagination and interest of the random passerby. As a result, some may wander in; or even we have a conversation; and if they take the bait entirely they are on the hook for a full blown tour: pointing out a DVD, VHS, and Laserdisc collection; old school arcade cabinets; toys and various video game consoles from another era; and much more. It’s like the actual space is both an archive and some part of my physical brain that can be re-fashioned as a window presentation every so often. The real key — and it has been happening — is getting more folks involved and making the space a communal hub. That’s work, and there’s no doubt I could and should be doing more, but little by little, the space is building a core group of folks who want to help with events and design the dioramas. That’s the coup; no longer is it simply the mad ravings of one person’s myopic interests — it’s about connection, and the analog is actually digital: a physical blog in space and time that creates a hub for interfacing old and new tech and building an “edtech” community outside my traditional role in higher ed, given my current circumstances.
I’m realizing, as I come to the end of this post, that I already wrote some version of this very idea as part of the Reclaim Open 2025 Blog-a-thon. So, the challenge will be to re-fashion this as a respectable submission for ILTA; we’ll see how that goes.
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*Worth noting that we had it easy at Reclaim because we were already distributed before the proverbial shit hit the fan.
†There’s a Ghost blog at bava.studio with about 30 subscribers and my occasional post on bavatuesdays.
