Eric Vernhes

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).