June – July 2022.  Office Space Burbank curates its inaugural show: “Norman M. Klein, The Secret Rise of Skunk Works, 1937 – December 6, 1941.”  Featuring a site-specific installation curated and assembled by Patrick Winfield Vogel, the show is an additional tale of The Imaginary 20th Century.   It is a staging of the espionage activities of Harry Brown, and one of his agents, Barney G., who works in a hidden part of Burbank where Lockheed Aircraft built housing for its employees.  The setting is 1938 into the fifties.

An excerpt from the exhibition text:

“Strange that Barney’s life, or whatever it was, had finally come to light; as part of the growing fascination with the recent discovery of Harry Brown’s files.  Barney is on the ledger, in low profile.  Articles recently about Barney have compared him to Kafka’s Joseph K, if Joseph had better furniture.

Barney stayed almost buried in his little office throughout the war.   One historian called him “a vacuole to history.’ He remained in that  9 x 15 foot office for at least six hours a day, sometimes twelve.  He stayed at his job for sever years at least, in that single room (with skylight added, to keep him from getting suicidal).  That means at least two years after activities were wrapped into Skunk Works in 1943.  One theory is that he stayed working there into the fifties.

Barney was undoubtedly a prologue to the postwar FBI and CIA, like an Eric Ambler version of a John Le Carré novel.  Most certainly, he was a prelude to how Lockheed kept secrets during the war and afterward.  Starting in 1943, Skunk Works became the ‘secret wing’ of  Lockheed,  where reconnaissance and spyware were developed, like the infamous U2 aircraft during the Cold War.

One might well theorize Barney as cybernetic, even poststructural– lost in an internet anti-zone long before the Internet existed.   Like so many of us today, he survived along a highly physical trail of bytes and information.  And his workload stretched as time went on.  He was soon a courier for engineer’s drawings from Disney, while the film Victory Through Air Power was made.  His back-channel room was only blocks from the Disney Studios as well, and less than a mile to Warners.  He was sometimes a courier for Hollywood, even during wartime strikes.”

2017-2019.  The Imaginary 20th Century re-entered the gallery space through the subject of the body and the story’s riddle–“the future can only be told in reverse.”  CICA Museum featured the media narrative and print novel with essays in the exhibition “The Digital Body,” on view in the spring of 2017.  Glendale College hosted a presentation, as part of the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series for 2017.  A collaboration with artist Jane Mulfinger produced “The Future Can Only Be Told in Reverse,” a group show of thirteen art works responding to The Imaginary 20th Century.  The exhibition was on view at the gallery of UCSB’s College of Creative Studies in early 2018.  The works– ranging from photography, painting, performance, video, installation, and sound– were broadly contextual responses and/or inspirations from details of the narrative and archive.  Common aspects included the contrary layering of information, the gaps of selective memory and memory distortion, and the embedding of the digital within the analog.  In March 2018, the Museo Tamayo hosted a presentation of the media narrative as part of an exhibition program.  A solo show of The Imaginary 20th Century was organized by the art gallery at the University of Maryland in the fall of 2018.  In addition to the media narrative and print novel with essays, the exhibition featured two curated works: Clay Burton’s Sound Scriber music machine, An Unauthorized Compendium: Collected Recordings & Images, Batch No. C-135 and 7 Pieces from Carrie’s Archive, an installation of rare books and archival documents drawn from university collections.  For the first time, The Imaginary 20th Century is paired with Klein’s media novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (2003).  The two media novels were on display in November 2019, at KWI / Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany.

Norman Klein visits Media Studies at The New School to present The Imaginary 20th Century, in conjunction with talks on the picaresque rogue’s tale as a narrative form about our condition today, after the end of globalization.  The work provides the springboard for a research lab during the spring semester, entitled “Archeologies of the Present,” for USC School of Cinematic Arts.  ZKM releases the print edition of the book, followed by readings at Los Angeles area bookstores.  Bistis and Klein are joined by CalArtians Tom Leeser and Dan Bustillo for a conversation on artistic collaboration at Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel.  Klein delivers his lecture on ‘The New Picaresque” in London, at the Miracle Marathon, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, and Goldsmiths University.  Interviews and reviews appear in LARB, Entropy Magazine, Das Magazin, and Image & Narrative.  Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist selects The Imaginary 20th Century for Süddeutsche Zeitung’s ‘Book of the Year 2016.’

2015 opened with workshop presentations of The Imaginary 20th Century.  What makes an archive come to life as story?  What are the possible uses of archive for fiction writing, cinema, and world-building design?  The workshops took place in Germany at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and the University of Cologne, and in Los Angeles at USC’s Interactive Media Division.

On May 8, 2014, in honor of the publication of The Imaginary 20th Century ebook in tandem with the narrated media archive, the Goethe-Institut hosted a presentation and interactive installation.  Angelenos joined in a free-ranging discussion of the spaces between fact and fiction, archiving, and the future of the book in the era of the “postdigital”.  Seismicity Press at Otis College of Art and Design, and The Center for Integrated Media at CalArts hosted follow-up readings and conversations.  How can we use the computer to generate fresh templates for culture?  Wherein lies the space outside the loop machine of late modernism, with its relentless convergences and collage effects?

In January 2014, The Imaginary 20th Century was the subject of a 4-week workshop on narrative media at Art Center College of Design.  How do we bring urgency and contour to the act of moving through visual data on the screen, in immersive spaces, inside printed text?  How do we convert the viewer/reader’s journey into a compelling ‘movable’ form of storytelling?

In November 2013, Norman joined visual artists and academic researchers in Sweden for a 2-day workshop on memory at the University of Gothenburg.  Through papers and audio-visual screenings, participants in “Memory Acts” sought to propel debates on personal remembrance and collective memory in new directions.

On April 10 2013, Norman “absolutely brought the house down” at this symposium at the Royal College of Art in London.  Noam Toran, the organizer, wrote that “the auditorium was buzzing …, and the material looked great on the big screen … the maps, which everyone agreed were beautiful, particularly the NYC one, its kaleidoscopic energy immediately brought me back to my childhood visits to Coit tower in SF, and the New Deal funded mural inside.”  On September 14th, Margo joined the symposium on the west coast, in Pasadena at Art Center College of Design.  The purpose of this event?: “To investigate the historical understanding and future potential of ‘things’ as narrative or philosophical protagonists.”