jihui presents Norman Klein -- Friday, Oct 17, 7 PM

jihui - Digital Salon presents
Norman Klein
Friday, Oct 17, 2003 7 PM AT
Parsons Center for New Design
55 West 13th Street, 9th Fl.
New York, NY 10011
Live Webcast AT (http://agent.netart-init.org) starts 7pm EST.

Scripted Spaces in the Age of the Electronic Baroque

Like the seventeenth century Baroque, Americans suddenly are buried inside a fundamentalist Thirty-Years war. Meanwhile, scripted entertainment operates as an instrument of power for those exploiting this war. What emerging art strategies best capture the alienation – and comic perversities – brought on by this Electronic Baroque moment? A presentation and discussion.

As Victorians used to say, we feel trapped between two worlds, one that is dying, and another that is crying to be born. For cultural work, that may not be a losing position at all.

Norman Klein is a cultural critic, an urban and media historian, as well as a novelist. His books include "The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory," "Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon," and the data/cinematic novel, "Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles,1920-86" (DVD-ROM with book), which was shown at the Future Cinema exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe (http://www.zkm.de/futurecinema/klein_werk_e.html). His next book will be "The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects." (Fall, 2003).

His essays appear in anthologies, museum catalogs, newspapers, scholarly journals, and on the WEB – symptoms of a polymath's career ranging from European cultural history to animation and architectural studies, LA studies, fiction, media design and documentary film. His work (including museum shows) centers on the relationship between collective memory and power that emerges in instances ranging from special effects to cinema to digital theory, usually set in urban spaces; and often on the thin line between fact and fiction – erasure, forgetting, scripted spaces, the social imaginary.


jihui (the meeting point), a self-regulated digital salon, invites all
interested people to send ideas for discussion/performance/etc.
jihui is where your voice is heard and your vision shared.
jihui is sponsored by the Digital Design Department and Parsons Design Lab
jihui is organized by agent.netart
(http://agent.netart-init.org), a joint public program by NETART
INITIATIVE and INTELLIGENT AGENT