The Skullcracker Suite research residency: BC Timeslip (the Empire Never Ended) at Dynamo Arts Association in Vancouver, August 2016

For the duration of the collaborative research residency, Stephanie Moran, John Cussans and Gregoire Dupond set up an Investigations Bureau in the gallery. The project asked, ‘what might the decolonization of thought look or feel like?’ via reimaginations and reconstructions of Philip K. Dick’s 1972 stay in Vancouver, where he gave his talk ‘The Android and the Human’ before suffering a mental breakdown and spending several weeks checked into X-Kalay rehab clinic for indigenous ex-con addicts.

The Skullcracker team started work on a film based on Philip K. Dick's time in Vancouver, combining 360 degree and regular AV footage, to be completed in 2019. Stephanie's account of the residency as science-fictional ballet can be found here.

 

The residency included screenings and encounter-style discussion groups with local artists and academics (indigenous and settlers) to try to understand the complex issues around the local, non-metaphorical, context of decolonization, in relation to Philip K. Dick’s science fictional colonisation novels such as The Man in the High Castle (1962) or Martian Time-Slip (1964) and post-Vancouver novels A Scanner Darkly (1977) and Valis [Vast Active Living Intelligence System] (1981).