Norman Klein & Margo Bistis
The Imaginary 20th Century
2016, interactive installation, 2,200 images & films, maps, sound composition & voice-over narration
Norman Klein’s and Margo Bistis’ The Imaginary 20th Century (2016), featured in the exhibition, operates as an interactive media novel with a database of 2,200 images and films. The story of Carrie and her suitors takes viewers across centuries, continents, historical events, imperialist and utopian fantasies. All the characters are misremembering the future differently, leaving spaces between, allowing the viewer to puzzle out the phantom that was collectively imagined a century ago.
The Imaginary 20th Century is a tale of seduction as well as espionage, of archiving and the poetics of excavation. The online tale shares the stage with a print book, at once a votive offering to the interface, and an expanded version of the story with historical essays. Written by Norman M. Klein and Margo Bistis, The Imaginary 20th Century is a multi-media ‘wunder-roman‘, at once a comic picaresque and a treatise on the twentieth century.
In 1901, a woman named Carrie, while traveling in Europe, invites four men to seduce her, each with a version of the coming century. At least this is how the legend comes down to us. Inevitably, the future spills off course. We navigate through the suitors’ worlds; follow Carrie on her travels; discover what she and her lovers forgot to notice. Gradually, we discover that Carrie’s misadventures with her suitors are implicated in her uncle’s world of business and espionage. For over forty years, Harry Brown was hired to erase crimes for the oligarchs of Los Angeles and the banking industry of New York. A pioneer in how to troll, hack, and manipulate the truth, Harry often used American myths of progress and future technologies in the cover-ups. As he liked to say, fiction is more believable than fact; and espionage is a form of seduction.
In 1917, Harry sets up a massive archive of his niece’s life and legend. The archive records his obsessions with Carrie and also the various world events where he intervened. In 2004, the remains of Carrie’s archive was unearthed in Los Angeles. Thereafter the federal government allowed a few scholars to study and decode it.
All 2,200 items of the archive have been digitally assembled in an exploratory interface with voice-over narration and sound compositions taken from Harry’s notes. Viewers journey through interactive card clusters of photographs, films, comic illustrations, manuscripts, mechanical drawings, and print ephemera like postcards, stereo-cards, and maps spanning the years 1885 to 1925.
The book as well as the interactive novel are available online: https://imaginary20thcentury.com/
