Building a Blog You Can Walk Into

I’m working under the gun, as usual, and I have to put together a 20 minute presentation for the “Ooh Blogging is a Place on Earth” presentation I’ll be delivering in Dublin next week at ILTA’s 25th anniversary EdTech conference. I particularly feel the pinch this morning because my slides are due by end-of-day, and I haven’t built out a visual and narrative framework for the talk yet, even if I have a good idea of where it’s going. So, here it goes.

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Title Slide with an embed of the Belinda Carlisle music video of the song “Heaven is a Place on Earth” so that I can sing it to the audience. They get their money’s worth right outta the gate.

After that, I try and go back to the origins of the idea of “blogging as a place on earth,” namely COVID-19 in Italy.

This will be setting the scene for downtown Trento where there was a ridiculously high rate of storefront vacancies (something still lingering). The pressure from online retail giants like Amazon was already hurting local businesses enough, but COVID seemed to finish the deal. Also, vaccines became highly contested and it was both an alienating and divisive time for many.

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 my basement and back into the world.

Knowing there were plenty of spaces available downtown for a steal, I started looking for a studio to work from as a means to stop being a Chud, while also trying to create a bit more separation between home and work. 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.

Reclaim Video’s World Premiere at #OER18

And while my blog has been the best creative outlet for me over the last 20 years, in the wake of COVID I was looking for some way to ground that in a more physical, connected space that placed me inside a community.

Image of the bava.studio storefront from the 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 🙂 ).

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).

The best laid plans of mice and men…

Turns out at the same time I signed the lease I’d been holding on for dear life mentally. I slipped into a pretty rough depression for most of the winter and spring. Happens to the best of us, I guess.

The Old Disturbance

I got back on my feet in early summer feeling somewhat disoriented, having made no progress on the space. In August and September there was enough energy returning to actually start building out the vision, which was not dissimilar to Lloyd Dobbler’s philosophy in Say Anything. I don’t want to …

The bava.studio really came into its present state in the fall of 2024. The window exhibition space/diorama was built, as was the laserdisc wall that separates the front portion from the clandestine arcade.

RGB: a bava.studio production

Here were the early plans, which are still fairly accurate:

And save a few tweaks for simplicity and space, bava.studio became an exhibition space, video store, and desk facing the street.

That desk piece was important because I wanted people to think it was a store and wander in.

Whereas the hidden door in the laserdisc wall gives way to an arcade which, at this point, was not finished.

Before finishing the arcade speakeasy, however, I built the first of what would be an ongoing, collaborative effort of dioramas.

Creepshow Diorama: Lights, Camera, Sand!

A scene from George Romero’s Creepshow (1982) would be my first diorama:

I commissioned art from Bea Kotuk that had the comic condensed into a few panels that would provide the walls and ceiling. I had not yet figured out how to manage perspective and vanishing points, but that would be the focus of the next diorama several months later.

Inspired by something I saw in a pizza parlor in 2010 (which I blogged about) I knew exactly what the next diorama needed to be. That said, I struggled with creating this one for months. I needed to introduce perspective into the equation to capture the depth of the hallway the twins appear in, but I had no idea how to do it. Thankfully, Wren and Kamille showed up in Trento for just long enough to break the creative block:

They helped me figure out how high and low the floor and ceiling should be, and at what angles. Same thing for the walls to make the hallway convincing. The rest took about 10 days, and the result is still the best diorama to date.

… but there were others. We followed this up with another collaborative effort (this time my wife, son, and family friend Riki) to create a diorama featuring Michael Myers emerging from behind the bush in the original Halloween (1978).

Halloween Diorama Wrap-up

For this diorama all the backgrounds were hand-painted, and it was a bit more interactive in that you could move Michael Myers from behind the bush and hide him as well:

In fact, we created this diorama in record time, just under two weeks. The reason behind the rush is it needed to be live by October 31st to coincide with our first public event: The Halloween Haunted Arcade.

This event essentially turned the space into a haunted house/escape room wherein a group of 7-10 people were locked in and had to complete a series of tasks in order to find the power and turn on all the arcade machines.

Getting into the diorama groove, I had big plans for a Xmas diorama featuring a 3-D rendering of the horror movie poster Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Turns out with family visiting and the usual stress of the holidays my eyes were bigger than my stomach, but necessity was somewhat the mother of invention because I had the idea of simply scaling up a copy of the VHS tape and putting that in the window. Still 3D, but just a lot easier.

All the while, the space was gaining momentum. Any given day 5-10 people enter the space and ask me the same question: “What the hell is this place?” That often leads to me giving a tour of all the various elements like the VHS tapes, Laserdiscs, arcade machines, toys, diorama space, and more. It’s fun, and it’s even cooler to have to explain to them again and again that I don’t sell anything. The idea of subverting the storefront as transactional space is part of the plan.

Tetris Tournament Recap

This almost catches us up. This past winter we had our most successful event yet: a Tetris tournament. It just so happens the world champion Tetris player lives just south of us in Rovereto, and Riki organized a tournament which he conducted, and it turns out folks love Tetris. We had well over 100 people throughout the day, and it was a lot of fun.

The diorama for this event featured an old-school TV with Tetris playing. I also figured out how to connect a wireless controller so that folks could play from outside the space, but I have yet to figure out how to secure it adequately.

The Tetris diorama led me to play with an idea for a recurring installation called “the living room console” that features different consoles and games, and will hopefully allow me to return to letting folks play them from outside the window.

As a result of the success of the Tetris event, we’re now working on our next diorama and concurrent event celebrating the 1% with a They Live diorama.

In fact, the idea came from one of the bava.studio regulars, Mattia, and he has mapped out the whole thing.

He even designed all the buildings that will be created using a 3D printer.

We now have that 3D printer in the window of the diorama currently creating the various pieces of the scene:

So, what the hell is this presentation all about?

I’m not sure exactly, but if I were to try and bring it back to a salient point it might be that building spaces of engagement locally that can bridge the virtual, and vice versa, might be one way of escaping the dislocation many of us have been feeling online.

Everything I have shown you today is really just a series of blog posts, some physical and others virtual. The bav-o-rama dioramas are local posts to the community of Trento. To create them I am pulling from an archive of material that are the contents and products of the storefront. The various people that come by, comment, and participate in the events are the growing community. It’s slow-going, for sure, but so is blogging. What’s more, it fills a deeply human need I have in a foreign world to connect in time and space with the community I live in.

And that is the presentation, I will have to practice it for timing to make sure I get it all in under 20 minutes, but a lot of this is visual fluff, the main idea can probably be communicated in less than 10, but I like my geeky digressions.