Abstract

Sketch 2 for a Time-Slip Installation was created for a multi-modal artistic research project called BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended) which began as a residency at Dynamo Arts Association (DAA), Vancouver in August 2016. BC Time-Slip is the first phase of a larger artistic research project exploring the discourse of decolonization in British Columbia from ethnographic, Indigenous and science fictional perspectives called The Skullcracker Suite. During the residency the DAA gallery was converted into a Special Investigations Room researching Philip K. Dick’s visit to Vancouver in 1972 and his stay at an experimental rehab community called X-Kalay. During the residency I organised and documented a program of public talks, lectures and screenings, and produced a series of 360° videos depicting Dick’s time in the city, myself playing the author. Sketch 2 takes Dick’s short story Colony (1953) as a way to draw correlations between the assimilation of life-worlds by alien simulation technology in Dick’s fictions and the European colonization of what is now British Columbia. The video is the second of two sketches for an exhibition in the future.