Meeting Phillip @ NEMO

“Meeting Philip” is a musical, video, and visual work based on the recording of a lecture given by Philip K. Dick in Metz in 1977.

During this lecture, Philip K. Dick revealed that one of his favorite themes, the existence of a plurality of parallel worlds, was indeed reality and not fiction. For him, there was no doubt that our world was the product of a computer program whose designer (God, programmer-reprogrammer) episodically changed variables in the past, disrupting the course of our present time and giving rise to other, divergent, uchronic worlds. “Deja-vu” impressions were a direct result of this “reprogramming”. He then began to recount his own “slippages” from one world to another, claiming that in one of them, he had been assassinated by Richard Nixon’s administration. In yet another, he had met Aphrodite in a pre-Christian landscape whose description resembled a comic book illustration.

The public did not follow him down this hallucinatory path, and commentators, out of respect for the writer’s reputation, cast a veil of modest oblivion over the lecture.

In “Meeting Philip”, a visual and sound art installation, I don’t answer the question of the credibility of Philip K. Dick’s story. Rather, I consider this question to be irrelevant. Confronted with the many facets of Dick’s personality, his wanderings and his flashes of brilliance, I take the side of the writer against the self-proclaimed prophet. In the end, the latter (who has never convinced anyone) is merely the tool of the former (who is recognized as brilliant).

So I’m giving space to the one who wants to captivate, and forsaking the one who wants to convince.

Through editing and selection, the text is transformed into an opera libretto. It is thus freed from the constraints of pseudo-scientific coherence and placed at the service of a dazzling narrative machine. The key elements of his narrative are used without distorting them: the affirmation of the plurality of parallel universes and the account of his own experiences of “passing” from one world to another. On the other hand, the demonstrative arguments that give rise to incredulity and doubt are left out or just touched upon.

Through music, light, image and wind, the “Meeting Philip” installation gives Dick’s text the epic dimension it deserves, adding the “Hugolian” touch – the touch of inspiration – where it was lacking.

Objects play a key role in Philip K. Dick’s work. Not only do they attest to the existence of a plurality of parallel worlds, but they also serve as tools of transition between these different worlds. The tape recorder at the center of the “meeting Philip” installation is one of these “special” objects. Contemporary to Philip K. Dick, it refers to the raw material of the music: a conference recording made on a similar device. But more than that, it serves as a medium for the novelist’s voice, speaking to us from a parallel temporal world (the first words are “I’m not there anymore, I’m not sure I ever was…). By proxy, he personifies the speaker in our present time.

The totemic form refers as much to the speaker’s claims (“Now I must speak like a prophet…”) as to the stature acquired by the writer in the years following the lecture: that of an essential inspiration of modern science fiction.