PREMIERE EXHIBITION:
Los Angeles & Berlin: UCLA Conference 2001
|
|
|
|
PREMIERE EXHIBITION: |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Conceived as a co-production between The Labyrinth Project, ZKM (Center for Art And Media) and cultural historian, Norman Klein, Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 combines a database detective story with a contemporary city symphony and a metanarrative reflection on storytelling in this new medium. The story’s setting is a three-mile radius near downtown Los Angeles, a city known for not having a center. This ethnically complex location is documented through archival stills and films and through contemporary images that either reproduce or evoke them. |
| The narrative can be navigated in three ways. Positioned within a small window, author Norman Klein tells the story of Molly, a fictional character based on a real life person who may have murdered one of her husbands, and he invites users to collaborate with him in writing this fictional life. Secondly users can explore what Molly never noticed—the back stories of real people whose mini-memoirs preserve histories that otherwise might have been lost. And finally, the project leads users to reflect on this act of database storytelling and its cultural implications, particularly when set within LA’s urban dream factory. The contrast between past and present is most dramatic and uncanny in the back stories, where the user can slide fluidly between "bleed-throughs", old and new photographs of the same Los Angeles cityscape taken from precisely the same angle, watching buildings instantaneously emerge or vanish. |
| Drawing on hundreds of photographs, newspaper clippings and films from USC’s archives with additional material from personal collections and the collections of the Los Angeles Public Library and Automobile Club of Southern California, "Bleeding Through" helps users refigure their vision of Los Angeles, particularly if it is based primarily on representations from Hollywood mainstream movies. |