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This chapter explores the multiple levels of authenticity involved in son et lumière and projection mapping. Light shows are increasingly staged at historic sites, using monumental buildings as canvases. The use of light allows the buildings to communicate, giving them a performative, additional dimension, generating multiplicity, where the same architectural structure or place is encountered simultaneously in both its light and physical forms. The effect is hyperreal, transforming buildings into simulacra, versions of distorted reality, where no original exists. As the building appears to move, the mind simultaneously informs the viewer that it is static, evoking a co-created tourist experience. Light shows, arguably staged by “imagineers”, reflect the increasing move toward the spectacle essential for creative and experience economies.

Purpose: This paper examines a promotional exhibit for the Broadway musical Wicked, entitled “The World of Wicked,” to better understand the ways in which art marketers continue to hail new and existing consumers. Eco’s concept of hyperreality and its relationship to remediation and cultural sustainability are brought to bear upon this phenomenon. As producers utilize new media platforms to reach the consumer, they make the experience of their shows more immediate. Set in the context of a shopping mall, the hyperreality of the exhibit is unpacked and analyzed.

Design: This is an interpretive study using direct observation, participant observation, depth interviews, narrative analysis, and artifact analysis.

Findings: By facilitating embodiment, encouraging intense emotional arousal, and providing a sense of community, “The World of Wicked” is a metonym for Wicked itself. The hyperreal context of the shopping mall facilitates the consumption of fantasy as well as material goods.

Originality and value: The findings of this paper extend theories of hyperreality, adaptation, and remediation into the context of arts. This contribution is foundational to building a larger theory of cultural sustainability.

Del Toro's adult fairy tales create their horror via a disruption in the familiarities of place and identity using a connection between a purposeful mise en scène and techniques of sound design world-building that he borrows from the long tradition of horror filmmaking. Though the discussion of the relation between image and sound in del Toro's films would (and do) fill a number of volumes and monographs, this chapter will focus on one particular technique long-employed by horror film sound designers, music supervisors and composers: extra-diegetic sound. Where diegetic sound is the audio that is part of the world of the film and non-diegetic sound its inverse, extra-diegesis points out that these bits of audio effectively collapse the world of the character with the world of the audience. Extra-diegetic audio is a diegetic audio effect (the source being clearly seen or pointed to in the visuals) that has been sweetened, enhanced or noticeably processed to include extra audio elements that are non-diegetic, making the whole of the audio both of the world of the film and simultaneously of the world of the audience. The audience notices and can clearly hear the extra enhancements, though in the stress and horror (which is the point) of the moment these distinctions may collapse and lead the audience to confuse the real with the pretend.