Author: Stephanie Moran

BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended) began at Dynamo Arts Association in Vancouver, British Columbia in August 2016. For the duration of the one month residency I set up a special investigations bureau in the gallery, using it as the operational base for an inquiry into the story of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s visit to Vancouver in 1972 to speak at a Science Fiction Convention, and his stay, after an attempted suicide, at the X-Kalay Foundation, a First Nations ex-con and addiction rehabilitation centre established by the inimitable raconteur, broadcaster and steadfast advocate of abstinence-based recovery, David Berner.

Thu. 25 Aug.  Time-Slip Film Screenings 18.30 – 21.30 Introduced by Stephanie Moran. Free, all welcome.

18.30 – 18.50 Shorts (in the spirit of F. Percy Smith):

1. Secrets of Nature – In All His Glory (1931) 10.14 minutes
2. Secrets of Nature – Abnormal Methods of Nutrition (1931 – 1939) 10.27 minutes. These British instructional films reveal the microscopic, cosmicly science-fictional natural world up-close.  Time-lapse opening flowers, slow-motion bees and pollen, and inter-species reproduction and feeding methods; weirdly Christian title belied by tongues in flowers, bees raising eyebrows, and the depiction of the “severe specialisation in chance”. Time-lapse time-slip vegetable beings: cannibal plants, necromantic saprophyte fungi, the survival tactics of feeble radicals and predation’s monstrousness. [Break]

19.00 – 19.30
Orphan Drift, You Its Eyes 94-13, edit by Mer Maggie Roberts (2013) 31 minutes
Cyberfeminist hive-mind collective 0rphan Drift’s radical experimentation with subjectivity through the avatar 0D. Female becoming AI monstrous desiring liquidity; remixed rave-inspired works from the mid to late 1990s. Accompanied by audio from 0D’s Ocosi, Surface and Sadist, and by sound made for the 0D/CCRU “Syzygy” collaboration in 1999, remixed by CCRU’s Kode9, this screening is a hallucinogenic immersive experience, a meditation on rave, techno culture, and its posthuman potentialities.
[Break]

20.00 – 21.15 Shu Lea Cheang, Fresh Kill (1994) 78 minutes

Cyberfeminist artist Shu Lea Cheang’s experimental film portrays a dystopian biocolonial New York in the 90’s, conflating environmental and media racism, the politics of ‘toxic waste and garbage TV’; representing race and kinship, lesbian parenting and cyberhackers.
Beer and wine available at the bar.

Fri. 26 Aug. 12.00 – 18.00  INVESTIGATIONS BUREAU open to Public

18.00 – 19.30 An open conversation on the question: what might decolonizing thought look like?” facilitated by Randy Lee Cutler

Sat 27 Aug. 12.00 – 18.00 INVESTIGATIONS BUREAU open to Public

Sun 28 Aug 16.30 – 18.00 Informal gathering – drinks and conversation around themes of the project: Philip K Dick, cannibal metaphysics, colonization/decolonisation, ecology and biocolonialism, sci-fi and mythopoeisis, at Khan Lee’s field house residency at second beach in Stanley Park.

The field house is on the 2nd floor of the concession/public washroom building. Entrance at the back of the building through the gate. We have a sandwich board for the posting. All welcome.

FOMELHAUT-ALBEMUTH

Thursday 1st September. Final night of the Investigation Bureau: screenings and closing party

 19.00 Secrets of Nature – War in the Trees (1931) 8.49 minutes, Secrets of Nature – Mighty Atoms (1930) 9.45 minutes.

Featuring grubs, pupae, insect sex, zoological warfare and general insect horror. Plus the bio-horror of cheese mites: seething bodies of micro-cosmic beings depicted through sheer technical film-art virtuosity.

19.20 ‘Owl in Daylight’ by Intermission (2001) 10.11 minutes. Introduced by the former Intermission’s Derek Brunnen and Marianne Bos.

A videoscape for Philip K. Dick completed during a 2001 Movie Making Festival, this film was conceived, shot and edited in 48 hours. Extending the spirit of the festival each of the 10 team members directed a minute of the film and an original sound track was composed and produced during the given period.

19.45 ‘Sleeper’, animation by Marina Roy; sound by Graham Meisner (2004) 8 minutes.

Made using cel and collage techniques, stream of consciousness imagery flows in a way similar to the associations, condensations, and displacements of dreams. Sexy pastoral imagery morphs into science fiction nightmare.

‘The Floating Archipelago’, Animation by Marina Roy; sound by Graham Meisner (2015) 6 minutes

Part one of a feminist sci-fi narrative. Islands of land and ice break off from planet earth, animals and people are born from waqwaq trees, and women tend to the animals and plants as they float on island-ships through outer space. Vignettes and figures were constructed from cut adhesive vinyl.

20.00 ‘Green Skeen’ by Orphan Drift and Plastique Fantastique (2016) 40 minutes.

Collaboration between the hive mind that is OD and the mythopoetic fiction that constitutes Plastique Fantastique. Orphan Drift & Plastique Fantastique assemble technoanimals to summon Green Skeen (a green screen/skin techno-animal feeding on telematic signals) through chroma-key-ritual and drone-song.

 

 

Thu. 18 Aug.  Time-Slip Film Screenings 19.00 – 21.30 Introduced by John Cussans

19.00 – 19.45 Counter-Intelligence Special Operations: Raids and Searches  (1969) 36 minutes.

Cold war fact meets film noir fiction in this short CIA training film.

Break

 20.00 – 21.30 Conrad Rooks, Chappaqua (1967) 78 minutes.

Named after a hamlet in New York state that the director imagined as a place of spiritual harmony, Chappaqua follows the psychedelic-shamanic journey of Russel Harwick (aka Conrad Rooks), the alcoholic, drug addict and central protagonist of the film, who somehow finds himself in a sinister drug rehab establishment on the outskirts of Paris, being subject to a radical de-tox procedure called “the sleep cure”. A cut-up mélange of peyote flash-backs, recovered memories and gothic vignettes, Chappaqua depicts Rook’s fantastical journey to addiction-free sanity.

Shot in the USA, India, Ceylon, England and France, with the involvement of the Native American Church and Northern Cheyenne people of Lame Deer, Montana, Chappaqua features cameo appearances by William S. Burroughs, Swami Satchidananda, Alan Ginsberg, Moondog, The Fugs and Ravi Shankar. The name Chappaqua comes from the Algonquian word for a “place where nothing is heard but the rustling wind”.

Beer and wine available at the bar.

Fri. 19 Aug. 12.00 – 18.00  INVESTIGATIONS BUREAU open to Public

18.00 – 19.30 Talk by John Cussans: ‘BC TIME SLIP and CANNIBAL METAPHYSICS’

Sat 20 Aug. 12.00 – 18.00 INVESTIGATIONS BUREAU open to Public

Dynamo Arts Association
Suite 103 – 30 East 6th Ave
Vancouver, British Columbia V5T 1J4