In 2001, when pioneering new media artist Jeffrey Shaw was still founding director of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, he proposed an exciting co-production--between ZKM and The Labyrinth Project—focused on Los Angeles. This interactive work was to be based on The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, a book by cultural critic Norman M. Klein. The adaptation was to be co-directed by Labyrinth’s Rosemary Comella and ZKM’s Andreas Kratky, two brilliant interface designers, with Shaw and me functioning as co-producers. What resulted was Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986, an interactive DVD-Rom that was released with a booklet containing Klein’s fictional version of the story and brief essays by Comella, Kratky, Shaw and me. In 2002, when Shaw collaborated with Peter Weibel on curating a large scale exhibition at ZKM called Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, he included Bleeding Through in the show and two other works by Labyrinth presented as installations—Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill and The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River, a collaboration with Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács. All three projects are also featured in the catalog, along with essays by Klein (The Future of the Cinematic City) and by me (Designing a Database Cinema).
