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The Imaginary 20th Century is a historical comic novel and media narrative, written by Norman M. Klein and Margo Bistis, and published by the art museum ZKM. With a team of artists, the authors have invented a unique narrative machine where facts and fiction split and return, across spaces between.
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. 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 for his clients, 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. Completed in 1936, the archive records his obsessions with Carrie, and also the various moments in world history where he intervened. In 2004, the remains of ‘Carrie’s archive’ were unearthed in Los Angeles. Thereafter the federal government allowed a few scholars to study and decode it.
All of the 2,200 assets of Carrie’s archive have been reassembled in the order that Harry intended. The voice-over narration has been taken from his notes. Mechanically accessible to the viewer in an exploratory interface, the archive features photographs, films, satirical illustrations, manuscripts, architectural drawings, and print ephemera like postcards, stereo-cards, and maps spanning the years 1885 to 1925.
A multi-media ‘wunder-roman‘ with a print novel and essays, The Imaginary 20th Century is at once a comic picaresque and a treatise on the twentieth century. It is a playful and yet deadly serious meditation on one sentence: the future can only be told in reverse.
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