Mark Taylor: Bringing the Academy into the Electronic Era 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Hiding's design and brilliant neon colors resemble Wired magazine and the advertising art he writes about. Flow charts in the table of contents attempt to diagram the way the non-linear text flows, more like a magazine with thematically-related articles running parallel (and sometimes perpendicular) to each other on the page. By structuring a book that must be twisted and turned physically rather than read from front no back, which in its very construction counters the concept of a single truth, Taylor hoped to demonstrate that sometimes the design is the essence and that stripping away superficial layers leads not necessarily to true meaning but only to more layers of skin. "By 'hiding' I mean 'concealing' but also 'skin,'" he explains, "conjuring up both the idea of truths that are hiding from us and that of the 'hide,' the skin, that is the surface itself." His enjoyment in playing with words and their roots is evident throughout his conversation, and he uses multiple meanings as a tool to connect ideas that seem at first glance completely unrelated. In a sense, this very interest started him on the multimedia track in the first place: he first conceived of Cyberscapes while writing on Warhol and post-abstract-expressionist art for Disfiguring, a book about 20th-century architecture and religion. The chapter was called "Currency," playing on the word's simultaneous implications of money, modernity, and electronic currents. After all, he points out, money itself has become electronic. Taylor clearly takes pleasure in delivering his "five-minute history of Western philosophy," in which he deftly moves from the Platonic concept of transcendent forms and earthly matter through the Enlightenment to Freud's and Jung's introduction of the idea of the individual, the collective unconscious, and archetypes. Their ideas, he explains, completed a cultural transformation from the belief in a divine creation of humanity into a human creation of the idea of the divine. Now bringing in the post-structuralism of Derrida and introducing Kandinsky's idea of the redeeming role of art, he explains that contemporary consumer culture has achieved the postmodernist goal of the world as a work of art. "Las Vegas, city of identical buildings where only signs distinguish businesses from one another, is the emblem of the post-war consumer economy," he says. He concludes with the startling pronouncement that, viewed through the avant-garde perspective of the artist as prophet, "Las Vegas is the realization of the Kingdom of God on Earth." He leans back in his armchair and adds, smiling, "Religion is the most interesting where it is least obvious."