0
The Imaginary 20th Century
The Imaginary Twentieth Century is a novel that takes us through the twentieth century as it was imagined before it actually took place. In 1901, if the rumors are to be trusted, a wealthy young woman selects four men to seduce (or woo) her, each with their own imaginary version of the new century. We navigate through those worlds, follow the woman (Carrie) on her travels, witness what she and her lovers forgot to notice; and experience the tastes and sounds of the period from 1893 to 1926.
The journey contains a vast interactive archive, inside a carefully authored story, containing over two thousand images, sounds, animatics, illustrations, films, architectural illusions and city streets. The bodies of the woman and her bachelors will be built and filmed as puppets. Animated, layered environments, like motorized collages, will be added as well. The scholarly research that made this archive is very broad based, particularly on the city, the body, technology and social movements.
From the moment of birth of the media we reflect on media and how they changed the ways we construct our imagination, our memories and how we tell our stories. At the core of the project will be an interactive story grammar that sequences the vast amount of material into an elegant narrative flow. Along with the parallel layers the historic research is combined with a literary exploration.
