Norman Klein: Bleeding Through

by Rosemary Comella, Andreas Kratky, Norman M. Klein

A loosely constructed documentary underlying a flexible literary journey, Bleeding Through is an urban bricolage held together by the outline of a novel spanning 66 years. An interactive DVD-ROM, it explores the ideas of renowned cultural historian Norman Klein. At the center of the story is Molly--based on a real-life person--who may be hiding a murderer. She lives within a three-square-mile area near downtown Los Angeles, a death zone where more cinematic murders have been committed than anywhere else in the world. This neighborhood, one of the most complex ethnographic districts in the United States, is represented in Hollywood movies, urban legends, and real estate boosterism in ways that erase the lived ethnographic reality. Out of this rich blend of narratives, users must decide what to include and what to leave out so that their own version of the story will become legible--thus the reader discovers how fictions are concocted and misinformation disseminated.

60 pages, DVD-ROM

First published July 2, 2003

About the author

Rosemary Comella has been working since 2000 as a researcher, project director, interface designer and programmer at the Labyrinth Project. As part of Labyrinth, she developed the main interface for Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill, a collaborative project between experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill, Kristy H.A. Kang and the Labyrinth team, and she helped direct The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Current of the River, an interactive installation with filmmaker Péter Forgács. Additionally, she developed Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986, an interactive installation and DVD-ROM, in collaboration with media artist Andreas Kratky, cultural historian Norman M. Klein and the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Germany. She directed and served as photographer for Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment, an installation and DVD-ROM, including catalog, exhibited at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in 2005. Comella is currently creative director for Jewish Homegrown History: Immigration, Identity and Intermarriage,a public on-line archive and museum installation that aims to illuminate one hundred and fifty years of Jewish history in California. Through a visually engaging interface users are invited to practice their own historiography by inserting their own histories and memories—using text, home movies, photographs and ephemera—into the contents of the website. This user content becomes interwoven with previously published histories and newly uploaded scholar contributions. Additionally, an immersive museum installation will feature various select home movies, photographs and stories collected from the website to be re-orchestrated for particular themes for a multi-screen, cinematic presentation.

Reviews

[Natalie]

An interesting interactive book that walks the line between fiction and nonfiction. The DVD-rom part was a little buggy, but Norman Klein is brilliant.