DB Bauer

Completed

• “3D Media in the Transversal Era: A Techno-Cultural Analysis,” AfterImage: Journal of Media  Arts and Cultural Criticism 51, no. 1 (March 01, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2024.51.1.47.
  • Abstract: Transversal media move. They move with ease across a variety of interfaces, formats, materials, software, hardware, uses, and communities of practice. In this article, transversal media is an umbrella term used to classify media objects with the same underlying form that takes shape across a variety of materialities through freeze and flow states. Specific to 3D data, 3D transversal media are a distinct media type that have emerged from the development and proliferation of 3D media technologies, specifically the 3D printer, 3D scanner, and extended reality (XR) devices. The central characteristic of 3D transversal media is the ability to move back and forth across digital and atomic forms. Transversality offers an alternative to understanding and speaking of the digital and atomic as opposites, while also acknowledging the differences and similarities across those material transmutations. For instance, the same 3D transversal media object can be many things simultaneously: an animation on a screen, an object inside a virtual reality experience, a 3D-printed plastic figurine, a projected hologram, and more. This article tracks the complexities of 3D transversal media when they move across their individual and networked states, and moreover, the linked cultural and technological significance of that movement. This approach reveals how technology and media can inherit and reproduce hegemonic cultural ideologies and practices—whether intentional or not. To concretize this, the article concludes with a case study on Thutmose’s well-known bust of Nefertiti, now a 3D transversal object, and how its transversal affordances converge and interact with global cultural politics—specifically in this case, those related to colonialism and imperialism.
• “Playing with Dolls: Experiments in Transversal Media and Speculative Making,” the digital review 1, no. 1 (September 12, 2021), https://doi.org/10.7273/QFEY-DA16. 
  • Abstract: Playing with Dolls is a series of three works that explores the generative value of speculative making in humanities inquiry with 3D media technologies, including the 3D printer, virtual reality, and digital environments via toys and play. I combine Johanna Drucker's speculative computing, Sherry Turkle's evocative objects, and Matt Ratto's critical making to think through material, computational, and procedural forces. This project is founded on my concept—transversal media—which names this genre of 3D media defined by movement across platforms and materials while simultaneously existing discreetly in medium-specific modes, specifically as digital and physical media. Overall, Playing with Dolls explores the value of what can be learned about materiality, spatiality, and world-building through both making and interacting with transversal media. This process reveals new questions about what can be known when we put making at the center of humanities research. In The X-Files, Agent Fox Mulder suggests, "dreams are answers to questions we haven't yet figured out how to ask." Similarly, speculative making encourages us to continue asking questions of our own dollhouses and doll parts, simulated environments, and ways of thinking, doing, and being that are, like the dolls, similarly designed, fabricated, and reimagined through play.
• “Touchable Speculation: Crafting Critical Discourse with 3D Printing, Maker Practices, and Hypermapping,” in Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures 19 (January 2019), https://doi.org/10.20415/hyp/019.e03
  • Abstract: “Touchable Speculation” explores the scholarly value of making things and then writing about them. Extant digital humanities (DH) research on 3D printing often addresses its impact on artifact replication and preservation, museum programing, data visualization, and art practice. This project extends this discourse by exploring the epistemological and methodological impact of the 3D printer on humanities research and writing. Drawing from Johanna Drucker’s speculative computing and Matt Ratto’s critical making, this project is a DH experiment in speculative making. To concretize these ideas, an object created by the author, entitled fleshLAB, which explores human-computer entanglements and encounters, resides at the heart of this project. “Touchable Speculation” argues that speculative making in 3D is a particularly useful research method to examine the ideologies embedded into things, spaces, and encounters, and specifically evokes affective, haptic, temporal, and spatial epistemologies. For some maker-scholars, after the making comes the writing, and thus evokes the question, “how do we write about the things we make?” In response, this project’s second major argument is that scholarly making necessitates new modes of writing and publishing to fully incorporate the objects created in the process. Modeling one approach, this project utilizes hypermapping—scholarly writing overlaid upon an image of a 3D object via a digital, annotated image map. “Touchable Speculation” is but one example of what working in 3D and with a 3D printer can uniquely offer humanities projects in terms of epistemology, methodology, and writing, and how these practices may shape future (digital) humanities scholarship.

Currently Under Review

• DB Bauer and Christine Tomlinson, “Age Matters: The Status of Representations of Age in Game Design and Research,” Games, Self, & Society, submitted January 2026.

• “Learning Game Design, Reflecting on Life: Collaborative Lo-Fi Games for Student Analysis and Social Bonding,” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, submitted November 2025.

• “Design, Agency, and the Impact of Age: Developing and Exploring ‘Playerage’ in Video Games,” with Christine Tomlinson, Acta Ludogica, submitted November 2025.

• DB Bauer, Charlotte Biltekoff, Christy Spackman, and Sara El Sayed, “Food Futures Role-Playing Game,” Simulation & Gaming, submitted October 2025.

• Book Manuscript, “Capture Culture: The Technocultural Politics of Media…Now in 3D!” NYU Press, submitted June 2025.

• Book Chapter, “Expectations vs. (Virtual) Reality: 25 years in, 25 years out,” Metaverse & AI  2049: A Collection of Hopeful Virtual Futures, Columbia University Press, written September 2024; submitted to press by editors January 2026.