Recombinant Poetics, Urban Flânerie, and Experimentation in the Database Narrative Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920—1986

Abstract

Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920—1986, is a DVD-ROM produced under the auspices of the Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern California, and directed by the scholar/artist Norman Klein. Drawing on hundreds of photographs, newspaper clippings and films from the archives of USC, and the Los Angeles Public Library, among other sources, this DVD offers us the chance to reconsider our understanding and vision of Southern California. This database narrative proposes a multi-perspectived and critically informed exploration of Los Angeles, which to this day remains surprisingly unexamined. This article analyses this unconventional project and examines its objectives. Klein's experimental flânerie invites us to a renewed urban experience that relies on a set of distinctive formal characteristics. I will therefore discuss this project's exploration of mediatic combinations, and its resistance to narrative closure, in order to demonstrate that Klein tries to reinvent the way to engage with art and to write history.