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Modernity produces its other…as a way of at once producing and privileging itself. This is not to say that other cultures are the supine creations of the modern, but it is to acknowledge the extraordinary power and performative force of colonial modernity. Its constructions of other cultures—not only the way these are understood in an immediate, improvisational sense, but also the way in which more or less enduring codifications of them are produced—shape its own dispositions and deployments.
—Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present, 2004, p. 4.
It is Monday, 2 April 2012, and I am sitting at a Peet’s coffee shop in Marina del Rey, California talking to Jarrell Pair, former lead designer for FlatWorld (2001–2007), a flagship project of the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). In his book Virtuous War(2009), political theorist and United States military chronicler James der Derian identifies the ICT’s opening in 1999 as a founding moment in the emergence of what he names the military-industrial-media-entertainment network. Committed to strengthening the synergies of the entertainment and defense industries, the US Army allocated $45 million for five years to USC to create a research center for advanced simulation development. The US Department of Defense’s rationale for investing in new simulation technologies at the beginning of the twenty-first century is set out by retired Air Force Colonel Jack Thorpe, hired by the ICT at its 1999 founding. In an early concept paper, Thorpe puts forward the idea of “exploiting emerging technologies from theatrical set design [to] improve the fabrication of mockups for planning and rehearsing military operations in close-quarter spaces” (2000, p. 1). Der Derian embraces the credibility of this idea when he proposes that “[b]y its very task and potential power to create totally immersive environments—where one can see, hear, perhaps even touch and emotionally interact with digitally created agents—the ICT is leading the way into a brave new world that threatens to breach the last fire walls between reality and virtuality” (2009, p. 167). Along with its endorsement of sensory presence as a ground truth for knowledge-making (see Cohen Ibañez, 2016), der Derian affirms the potency of digital research and development. At the same time, he conceives the relation between the real and the virtual...