MEETING PHILIP

Métal, écran, ordinateur, projecteurs sur lyre, ventilateur, composition musicale et logiciel spécifique, son. 2.6*2.3*1m. Coproduction festival VIDEOFORMES 2024 – (c) CNRS pour la conférence).

"I'm not joking. This is very serious, very important. You have to understand that, for me, the fact of declaring such a thing is also astounding. A lot of people claim to remember past lives; I claim to remember another present life. I am not aware of such declarations, but I suppose that my experience is not unique. What is perhaps unique is the desire to talk about it."

Philip K.Dick, 1977

Meeting Philip is a musical, video and sculptural work built around the recording of the conference given by Philip K. Dick in 1977 in Metz. During this intervention, Philip K. Dick revealed that one of his favorite themes, the existence of a plurality of parallel universes, was indeed a reality and not a fiction. For him, there was no doubt that our world was the result of a computer program whose designer (God, programmer reprogrammer), episodically changed variables in the past, which disrupted the unfolding of our present time and gave birth to other uchronic and divergent universes. The feelings of "déjà vu" would result directly from this "reprogramming". He then began to tell the story of his own "slips" from one universe to another, claiming that in one of these worlds, he had been assassinated by the administration of Richard Nixon. In yet another, he had met Aphrodite in a pre-Christian landscape whose description resembled a comic book illustration. In Meeting Philip, a visual and sound art installation, the artist does not answer the question of the credibility of K. Dick's story, but rather considers that this question is irrelevant. Confronted with the many facets of K. Dick's personality, his wanderings and his flashes of brilliance, he takes the side of the writer against the self-proclaimed prophet. The latter (who has never convinced anyone) is ultimately only the tool of the former (who is recognized as brilliant).

EXTRACT (3 minutes):