"Special Effects Environments: Politics, Perversity, and Aesthetics"

Norman Klein

CalArts

Abstract: We live in an electronic Baroque civilization, where corporate power operates like a seventeenth century pope or prince. Is that dangerous? Consider what it produced back then. Indeed, what sort of practicum should we set up for the various fields that have been altered irremediably by the digital and by franchise tourism? This lecture will review architectural sources (scripted spaces), film sources (f/x films, stop motion animation, etc.), among various media. The narrative journey that consumers take has to be studied as systematically as a grammar, beyond the postmodern stratagems. We are moderns again, forced to shape new systems, new aesthetics; but we also are Baroque artists in an increasingly late feudal world.

Biography: NORMAN KLEIN is a cultural critic and novelist, 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," among a flock of essays and anthologies on animation, urban studies, digital media, architecture, design. Norman is a professor at California Institute of the Arts.