Norman M. Klein and Margo Bistis - Carrie’s archival tale (filled with evasions and contraditions) functions as a psychogeographical diagnostic that for us, operates as a kind of short-circuit — a comic tale potentially snapping many millenials out of their wi-fi induced social media malaise

Norman M. Klein and Margo Bistis, The Imaginary 20th Century, ZKM, 2016.


www.imaginary20thcentury.com/






The Imaginary 20th Century is a historical comic novel, written by Norman M. Klein and Margo Bistis, and published by the media art museum ZKM.  With a team of artists, the authors have invented a unique narrative engine where facts and fiction split off and return to each other. The viewer accompanies the characters across three continents.
In 1901, a woman named Carrie, while traveling in Europe, selects 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 misadventures; discover what she and her lovers forgot to notice. Gradually we find out that Carrie’s life is implicated in her uncle’s world of business and political espionage. For over forty years, Harry Brown was hired by oligarchs to erase crimes that might prove embarrassing. Thus, as he often explains, espionage is a form of seduction. In 1917, Harry sets up a massive archive of his niece’s world. In 2004, Carrie’s archive was unearthed and assembled in Los Angeles.
Featuring an exploratory interface of 2,200 rare images, the unfolding engine of archive and novel works as a single ‘wunder-roman’, with its reveals and contradictions.  The Imaginary 20th Century is at once a comic picaresque and a treatise on the last century.  It is a playful and yet deadly serious meditation on one sentence: “the future can only be told in reverse.”


… The Imaginary 20th Century could be approached as a contemporary version of the classic ‘great American novel’, seen from a more global perspective and including a large number of paratextual and metatextual material.  Klein is a great storyteller and the achievement of his work does not only depend on the reader’s amazement (hence the idea of ‘Wunder’, that Renaissance mix of astonishment and admiration we find at the heart of the Wunderkammer aesthetics of this novel) but also on his capacity of striking the right balance between surprise and suspense.
Klein has been a pioneering voice in the progressive disclosure of the mutual shaping and reshaping of storytelling in print and the narrative possibilities of the internet. …The Imaginary 20th Century, a work [co-directed] with cultural historian and curator Margo Bistis, is both a deepening of previous experiments and the result of new reflections on forms and formats of storytelling in the digital age.  The novel told in The Imaginary 20th Century resembles more an encyclopedia or if one prepares a creatively treated archive: not just one storyline but four storylines, not just fiction but enhanced fiction, that is fiction completed with substantial visual counterparts as well as faction, often of a very self-reflective type (Klein and Bistis play ball with the reader and viewers, explaining to her the ambition, the context and the procedures of the novel). The images do not ‘illustrate’ the text, they extend it with other means.  In a similar vein, the texts do not add narrative or nonnarrative captions to the images, they offer possible interpretations via specific combinations and recombinations of the often astonishing visual material.


Not a work of hypertext, The Imaginary 20th Century reveals a more humanistic approach to database aesthetics than many other projects…. At its heart, it is a story of seduction. The past is as seductive to the contemporary viewer as the four suitors’ visions of the future are to the heroine. - Kim Beil


…Carrie’s archival tale (filled with evasions and contraditions) functions as a psychogeographical diagnostic that for us, operates as a kind of short-circuit — a comic tale potentially snapping many millenials out of their wi-fi induced social media malaise. We must get beyond our fantasmatic, unambiguous visions of the future… And this project moves as fast as you want, or excavates as far as you choose to go.  Indeed, without a well-researched sourcebook like this, our premonitions and prognostications will be clouded by too much nostalgia, or false imaginaries. - Maxi Kim  


The Imaginary 20th Century not only negotiates the question of where the lines should be drawn between fact and memory, but the book doubles as a puzzle.  Its central sentence reads: ‘The future can only be told in reverse’.  This aphorism is as paradoxical as it is true.  Because after all, it is — among other things– about four visions of the future, but a future that lies in the past; getting reconstructed from the fragments of the archive. - Hans Ulrich Obrist


THE IMAGINARY 20TH CENTURY by Maxi Kim    

Jan Baetens's review (pdf)

Norman Klein is the author of the award-winning media novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (2003). A novelist, media and urban historian, his other works include The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; 7 Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon; The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects; Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales; and the forthcoming book A History of the Present: The Dismantling of the American Psyche. He teaches at California Institute of the Arts.
Margo Bistis is a cultural historian and curator. She has published essays on philosophical modernism, caricature and urban culture, and is the author of a forthcoming book, Fanfare for Bergson’s Ideas: Popular Enlightenment Culture in the Age of Mass Literacy. She teaches at Art Center College of Design.