Panel Statement
Panel: Transmedia Narrative: Modes of Digital Scholarship and Design Across Public Space
According to the sociologist Henri Lefebvre: “Social space cannot be adequately accounted for either by nature (climate, site) or by its previous history.” The inadequacy of going back through a region or city’s history, to discover its underpinnings, in order to explain its current state, is at the heart of Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (2003), an interactive DVD-ROM produced at Labyrinth in collaboration with Norman M. Klein, Andreas Kratky and myself as directors. With these inadequacies in mind, I intend to unravel how Bleeding Through tries to re-present the forces of daily life and the social imaginary that influenced downtown Los Angeles and its nearby neighborhoods that at one time fed its center. Additionally, I will speak about my own personal “digital city symphony” that I am currently developing that deals with issues of a working class neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area.
- Rosemary Comella, currently a PhD student in a media arts practice program at USC (US), is a new media artist with a background in the visual arts, in particular interface design, photography and video. Since 2000 she has been working as a researcher, project director, interface designer and programmer at the Labyrinth Project. At Labyrinth, she developed the main interface for Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill, a collaborative project between experimental filmmaker Pat O’Neill, Kristy H.A. Kang and the Labyrinth team, and she helped direct The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Current of the River, an interactive installation with filmmaker Peter Forgács. She directed and served as photographer for Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment, an installation and DVD-ROM, including catalog, exhibited at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in 2005. Comella is currently creative director for Jewish Homegrown History: Immigration, Identity and Intermarriage, a public on-line archive and multi-screen museum installation where users are invited to practice their own historiography by inserting their own histories and memories—using text, photographs and video—into the contents of the website. This user content becomes interwoven with previously published histories and newly uploaded scholar contributions.