Bleeding through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986

This interactive DVD-ROM explores the ideas of cultural historian Norman Klein.

A loosely constructed documentary underlying a flexible literary journey, it is an urban bricolage held together by the outline of a novel spanning 66 years.

At the centre is Molly - based on a real-life person - who may be hiding a murder.

She lives within a three square-mile area near downtown Los Angeles, a death zone where more cinematic murders have been committed that anywhere else in the world.

This neighbourhood, one of the most complex ethnographic districts in the United States, is represented in Hollywood movies, urban legends and real estate boosterism in ways that erase the lived ethnographic reality.

Out of this blend of narratives, users must decide what to include and what to leave out so that their own version of the story will become legible.

Within this multi-layered narrative space, the tone is ironic and spontaneous, as if it is still in the making.

By becoming involved in such a construction that combines cinematic language with concepts of information design and navigation, the user discovers how fictions are concocted and misinformation is disseminated.