The Freud-Lissitzky Navigator

The Freud-Lissitzky Navigator, 1999. (© Lev Manovich and Norman Klein) The Freud-Lissitzky Navigator is the partial reconstruction of a mythical computer game whose history spans the whole of the twentieth century. It is a computer-game prototype; a narrative about software; a virtual exhibition; an imaginary software; a tool for navigating twentieth-century cultural history; and an experiment in developing analysis of new media that uses the very forms of new media (in this case, computer games and software interfaces). The project grew out of conversations between Klein and Manovich about a problem that Klein had been wrestling with since 1995: how to imagine a navigable game for Sigmund Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams. If our civilization runs on databases, then somehow novels constructed purely from data should follow. They should sprawl like Balzac or Tolstoy but also rush along as if the nineteenth-century masters were reincarnated as game designers. The image at top right is from E.A. Link, Jr.'s 1931 patent application for a "combination training device for student aviators and entertainment apparatus." The other three images show various sections of The Freud-Lissitzky Navigator web site.

Norman Klein, 4513 Wawona Street, Los Angeles, CA 90065-5232. E-mail: <nmklein@email.msn.com>.

Lev Manovich, Visual Arts Department, University of California at San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0084. E-mail: <manovich@ucsd.edu>. Web: <http://www.manovich.net/FLN>.