A guided tour through the nuanced politics of architectural illusion, 'The Vatican to Vegas' takes the reader from lavish Baroque fantasies of the seventeenth century to the Electronic Baroque of today. The scripted spaces described by Norman Klein are punctuated with devices widely used in special effects since 1500: shocks, surprise twists, grand fakes and copies. Since its publication 2004, 'The Vatican To Vegas' has emerged as a classic across many fields, from media, architecture, to the fine arts and urban planning. Its timing was ironic: Klein assumed in 2004 that the future of scripted illusion was about to radically shift. This new edition brings the ironic story up to the present, and into the digitally overwhelmed scripted spaces of the future.

Norman M. Klein is a cultural and media historian and a professor in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts.