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Hollins University, a private, women’s liberal arts university located in southwest Virginia, is an embodiment of Foucault’s heterotopia: the juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible notions of “real” and “imagined” spaces enfolded into a specific context of “place.” 1 Of course, while Foucault gave the term new critical life, he did not invent it. Indeed, if one were to invoke the phrase at a medical conference on brain or body imaging science it would designate the displacement of embodied phenomena. In many ways, the new media project I describe in this paper brings together aspects of the two prevailing definitions of a heterotopia. Interfacing Affect: The Hollins Community Project is an experiment in new media that explores the ethics of new media interfaces through the emplacement of history, narrative, and embodied affect. The planning for this project was initiated early in 2006 as part of a collaborative National Science Foundation proposal that linked the resources and faculty of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Polytechnic and State University (Virginia Tech) with a much smaller women’s university, known for its unique arts and humanities programs. The collaboration between Hollins University and Virginia Tech brings together two institutions that are not only very different in size and mission, but with very different relationships to the history of southwest Virginia. Hollins in particular is an institution that has formed its notions of “community” out of an institutional identity grounded in “tradition” and local, self-generative history (many of the narratives describing the unique character of the University draw connections …