Pat O'Neill, mit Rosemary Comella , Kristy H.A.Kang und The Labyrinth Project ::
The Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O'Neill, 2002

interactive DVD-ROM, 3 screen computer installation
and linear DVD-version of the 35mm film as »work in progress«
color, sound, 73 min
courtesy The Labyrinth Project, Annenberg Center for Communication - University of Southern California

Funded by Annenberg Center For Communications at The University of Southern California, with additional funding from The Southern California Studies Center (SC2) and the James Irvine Foundation.

Visitors are invited to experience both the interactive DVD-ROM version and a screening of Pat O'Neill´s »work in progress« version of his upcoming film, The Decay of Fiction.

»[The DVD-ROM] is a companion to O'Neill's film, which is set in the present day, in a once grand Hollywood Hotel that is now in transition between respectability and ruin…. [Users] wander through the mysterious spaces of the abandoned hotel and interact with the ghostly traces of the people, events, and personal histories that are imbedded in those rooms. The world presents a complex array of multi-layered images and sounds allowing users to explore their oblique connections with the burdens of memory, both personal and cultural, and with the popular representation of Los Angeles history. While containing the essential components of narrative, they are put together in an unusual manner that undermines traditional storytelling by provoking us to think about stories and their reliance on arbitrary juxtapositions. When adapted to new hypertext media, these anti-stories invite visitors to choose their own combinations and thereby generate new narrative fictions.«

- The Labyrith Project -

About the film project ::
»The Decay of Fiction is based on the interaction between two filmic representations. The first is a factual presentation of a site; the second is the peopling of that site with a series of interwoven dramatic events. Its production began with the filming in time-lapse of a site,
an empty hotel awaiting demolition. The building was filmed exactly as it stood, with the camera moving through and around it in such a way as to contain a hypothetical drama to be enacted and filmed separately. Through the use of a motion-controlled camera, moves made on location can be replicated exactly in the filming of the actors. The final stage of production involves the compositing of the two elements—the actors are superimposed into the location…The backgrounds are shot using an accelerated time scale, so that the motion of light and shadow, the passage of sun and moon through the buildings and gardens is a very
important component in the drama. Relentless planetary motion underscores the temporality of the stories—they seem to be memories, or more likely, speculations about memory.«

- Pat O‘Neill -