Lecture date: 1998-11-30
What do shopping malls, casinos, video games, slot machines, theme parks and Baroque interiors have in common? The cultural critic and historian Norman Klein argues that they all rely on scripted spaces with illusionistic effects where the audience is a central character and the narrative is about power. Kleins lecture offers glimpses of the links between animation, narrative architecture, labyrinth systems, immersive interiors, and the political cultures they support – particularly what he calls the Electronic Baroque – developed in his book The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects.
Klein is a professor at California Institute of the Arts, and author of The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory and Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon.
NB: Questions are sometimes difficult to hear during Q & A.
