The Labyrinth Project is an art collective and research initiative on interactive cinema and database narrative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication. Under the direction of cultural theorist Marsha Kinder since 1997, this initiative works at the pressure point between theory and practice. After hosting "Interactive Frictions," a groundbreaking international conference and exhibition at USC in 1999, Kinder decided to focus on producing interactive narratives and installations in collaboration with visual artists and writers known for their experimentation with nonlinear forms. She assembled a group of talented digital artists --headed by Rosemary Comella, Kristy H.A. Kang, Scott Mahoy and associate producer and curator JoAnn Hanley--to oversee these productions. These collaborations also involve the participation of talented students from several divisions within USC’s School of Cinema-Television--animation, critical studies, interactive media, and production. No matter whether our primary collaborator is a filmmaker or writer, we choose to make our projects cinematic. For, Labyrinth is committed to creating a productive dialogue between the immersive language of cinema and the interactive potential and database structures of digital media.

All Labyrinth projects are what Kinder calls "database narratives." This term refers to narratives whose structure exposes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and are crucial to language: the selection of particular narrative elements (characters, images, sounds, events, and settings) from a series of categories or databases, and the combination of these chosen elements to generate specific tales. Although a database narrative may have no clear-cut beginning, no narrative closure, no three-act structure, and no coherent chain of causality, it still presents a narrative field full of story elements that are capable of arousing a user’s curiosity and desire. This desire can be mobilized as a search engine to retrieve whatever is needed to spin a particular tale or to provide a rich array of sensory and intellectual pleasures. These works frequently have a subversive edge. For, in calling attention to the database infrastructure of all narratives, they reveal a fuller range of alternatives. In this way, they expose the arbitrariness of so-called master narratives, which are frequently designed to appear natural or inevitable.

In designing a database cinema for the future, The Labyrinth Project purposely looks backward to earlier films and novels rather than forward to utopian visions because we strongly believe that the advancement of any medium can be greatly accelerated by new applications of experimentation from the past. All of Labyrinth’s primary collaborators have specialized in creating non-digital forms of database narratives--that’s one reason why we chose to work with them. On all of our projects, we take a conceptual and collaborative approach to interface design. We create a design that grows out of the material and that captures the unique style of the primary artist with whom we are working: the repetition compulsions of Chicano novelist John Rechy, whose network of painful memories and ritualized accounts of the sex hunt turn the world of gay cruising into one vast city of night; the claustrophobic circularity of Nina Menkes’s films of resistance, all featuring her sister as a deeply alienated woman trapped within a series of violent landscapes captured in long takes; the sensory beauty of Pat O'Neill's richly textured, multilayered films with their fluid camera movements and surprising surrealistic jolts; the mesmerizing quality of Péter Forgács's haunting documentaries based on found footage with their shadowy historical figures and melancholy rhythms; the vigorous stream of Norman Klein’s verbal commentaries on history, swirling with vivid details, comic asides, and fascinating digressions; and the rich quilting of Carroll Parrott Blue’s stories, dreams, and voices that interweave the struggles between her and her mother with the cultural history of Houston’s black community.

Funded by the Annenberg Center, with additional grants from the Rockefeller, Ford and James Irvine Foundations and from USC’s Provost, Lloyd Armstrong, projects from The Labyrinth have received considerable recognition. The first two CD-ROMs (released in 2000), Nina Menkes’s Crazy, Bloody, Female Center and Mysteries and Desires: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy were official selections at the Sundance Film Festival; and the latter won the New Media Invision Award for Best Overall Design. Three Labyrinth DVD-ROM projects were featured as interactive installations at ZKM’s "Future Cinema" exhibition in Karlsruhe, Germany in 2002 and are now touring throughout Europe and Asia. Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill (2002) also screened at Rotterdam, San Francisco and several other important international film festivals. Co-produced by ZKM, Bleeding Through Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (2003) is based on the writings of cultural historian Norman Klein (best known for The History of Forgetting). It is being distributed by ZKM with a companion book containing a novella by Klein and essays by his collaborators. Created in collaboration with Hungarian media artist Péter Forgács, The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River premiered in August 2002 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where it broke attendance records.

Two more Labyrinth Projects were launched in early 2003. The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing is an interactive DVD-ROM based on an autobiography by African American photographer Carroll Parrott Blue; the book and disc are being distributed together in a special edition by University of Texas Press. Dreamwaves, Labyrinth’s first on-line project, is being launched in April 2003. Featuring an innovative REM-like structure, this website provides an exhibition space for dream-based art and a discursive space for exploring dreams as a model of interactive database narrative. It is based on the award-winning print journal Dreamworks (1980-1988), which was co-founded and co-edited by Marsha Kinder and Kenneth J. Atchity and provides archival materials for the website. Both of these projects were supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Labyrinth Project also has a strong educational dimension. Kinder’s first interactive title (produced in collaboration with Charles Tashiro and Barry Schneider) was a hypertext called Blood Cinema: Exploring Spanish Film and Culture (1994), the first scholarly CD-ROM published in film studies. A companion to her book Blood Cinema (California 1993), it launched the Cine-Discs series of bilingual CD-ROMs on national media cultures (on which Kinder is general editor). The second title in the series, Yuri Tsivian’s Immaterial Bodies: a Cultural Analysis of Early Russian Cinema, won the 2001 British Academy Award for best Interactive Project in the Learning category.

Labyrinth is now building on this success by producing an experimental e-learning course on "Russian Modernism and Its International Dimensions. " With funding from USC’s Provost Lloyd Armstrong, this project is being developed by producer Marsha Kinder and creative director Scott Mahoy in collaboration with three of the world’s leading Slavic studies scholars: John Bowlt, a visual arts specialist at USC; Olga Matich, a literary scholar at UC Berkeley; and Yuri Tsivian, an early cinema specialist at University of Chicago. This courseware draws on authentic archival materials from USC’s Institute of Modern Russian Culture and from the New York Public Library. At the center it features an on-line multiple player role-playing game, being developed in collaboration with game designers from Gigawatt Studios. The game enables students to select avatars and participate in recreations of historical events. Like Blood Cinema, Kinder sees this course as only the first in a series. The second e-learning course in the series will focus on Pacific Island Culture.