Tag Archives: Norman Klein

The future of the digital novel is here thanks to Art Center faculty members Norman Klein and Margo Bistis

I20C2.3map

Built with a team of artists and designers, Art Center Humanities & Sciences faculty Norman Klein and Margo Bistis released The Imaginary 20th Century, a ‘wunder-roman’ online narrative engine where fact and fiction split off and return to each other to tell the story in a unique form.

The Imaginary 20th Century is a tale of seduction, as well as espionage; of archiving and the transitive poetics of excavation. According to legend, in 1901 a woman named Carrie selects four men to seduce her, each with a version of the coming century. Inevitably, the future always spills off course. We navigate through the suitors’ worlds, follow Carrie on her travels and discover what she and her lovers forgot to notice. In 1917, Carrie’s uncle sets up a massive archive of her life.  For decades, Uncle Harry had worked for the oligarchs of Los Angeles erasing crimes that might prove embarrassing.  Thus, as he often explains, seduction itself is a form of espionage. In 2004, this archive was unearthed in Los Angeles.

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Entering the Matrix with Media Design Practices’ dialectical bus tour

The data center at One Wilshire

The data center at One Wilshire

“How do I talk about infrastructure?” Norman Klein wonders aloud as Media Design Practices’ annual dialectical bus tour of Los Angeles gets underway on a sweltering Friday morning in September. This annual odyssey through the pivotal places informing the city’s past, present and future has become a rite of passage for students pursuing a masters degree in Art Center’s forward-thinking program exploring the subtextual ideas at the intersection of design, social impact and culture.

Norman Klein

Norman Klein

Klein, a media and urban theorist who divides his time teaching classes on the relationship between Los Angeles, history and forgetting at Art Center and CalArts, has been presiding over this event since its inception some ten years ago. The tour takes its name from the original concept, which placed him dialogue with then MDP faculty-member Peter Lunefeld, who is now a professor in UCLA’s Design/Media Arts department.  That lively meeting of the minds then formed the basis for the tours future pairings with Klein acting as the constant.

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Made Up Events Explore Design Fiction

Art Center’s Graduate Media Design program (MDP) announces two events that explore a resurgent interest in utopias and an emerging genre called “design fiction.” The first Made Up event—a panel discussion, AS IF: alternate realities—will be held today from 3 to 5 pm in the Wind Tunnel Gallery at South Campus.

The panel, hosted by MDP faculty member Tim Durfee, will feature researchers-in-residence Sascha Pohflepp, an artist and writer whose design fiction video installation, SUPERCALIFORNIA! was produced during his Made Up residency; Norman Klein, a cultural historian, critic, novelist and author of the database novel, The Imaginary Twentieth Century; and Julian Bleecker, a designer, technologist and researcher at the Design Strategic Projects studio at Nokia Design, as well as co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. Works from the 2010 MDP’s summer research fellows and current students will be on display to complement and inspire the discussion.

Next Thursday, Sept. 22, at 7 pm, the MDP and Broadcast Cinema will screen Utopia in Four Movements, a live documentary performed by Sam Green with music by David Cerf.  Green is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker whose feature, The Weather Underground, was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Cerf is a filmmaker, musician, sound artist and user interface designer at Apple who composed music for The Weather Underground. The screening, to be held at Hillside Campus in the Los Angeles Times Media Center, expands the Made Up project’s interest in utopias, dystopias and the fantastic.

Previous coverage of Made Up.