Introduction

The Future Imaginary features work by 11 artists who have responded to the new interactive DVD novel The Imaginary 20th Century by Norman Klein, Margo Bistis and Andreas Kratky. Klein's story is a journey into comic and perverse phantoms – factual, and at the same time, very fictional. It contains a double story: the story of the century that opened at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and the story of a woman (Carrie), who in 1901, selects four men to seduce her, each with his own version of the new century.

In Europe and America, between 1895 and 1926, there was not simply one 'imaginary 20th century.' Dazzling visions repeated and overlapped in seemingly endless nuances, like traveling through phantoms of an imaginary future fed by a single engine. In this project, that engine is a historical science-fiction novel that operates as a gigantic interactive database of 2,200 images with an original sound composition. The images are harvested from period illustration, cartoons, photographs, film, ephemera, industrial design, architectural drawing, urban planning schemes, science fiction, fantasy and utopian novels, and more. This collaborative venture follows up on Klein's award-winning interactive novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (2003). Like Bleeding Through, The Imaginary 20th Century is a new narrative form appropriate to the digital age at the end of a consumer-driven century and the DVD is viewable in the "library" section of this exhibition.

We worked in collaboration with author Norman Klein and cultural historian Margo Bistis to create this dynamic, kinetic and quixotic interpretation of man's need to envision the future. The curators and artists engaged with the novel and its database by assembling work in response to Klein's interest in what he calls the "misremembering of the future." The artists previewed the DVD novel and responded by either creating a new work or re-contextualizing existing work.

Tom Leeser, Director of the Center for Integrated Media at California Institute of the Arts
Meg Linton, Director of the Ben Maltz Gallery and Public Programs, OTIS College of Art and Design

DVD-Rom Novel The Imaginary 20th Century by Margo Bistis, Norman Klein, and Andreas Kratky

The Imaginary 20th Century is a journey into the comic and perverse phantoms - factual, and at the same time, very fictional. It contains a double story: the story of the century that opened at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and the story of a woman (Carrie), who in 1901, selects four men to seduce her, each with his own version of the new century.

In Europe and America, between 1895 and 1926, there was not simply one 'imaginary 20th century.' Dazzling visions repeated and overlapped in seemingly endless nuances, like traveling through phantoms of an imaginary future fed by a single engine. In this project, that engine is a historical science-fiction novel that operates as a gigantic interactive database of 2,200 images with an original sound composition. The images are harvested from period illustration, cartoons, photographs, film, ephemera, industrial design, architectural drawing, urban planning schemes, science fiction, fantasy and utopian novels, and more. This collaborative venture follows up on Klein's award-winning interactive novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (2003). Like Bleeding Through, The Imaginary 20th Century is a new narrative form appropriate to the digital age at the end of a consumer-driven century. It is being released as a DVD-Rom with an accompanying book by Verso in Spring 2009.