The Modern Language Experiment in partnership with Filmarmalade presents
Imagining a re-synchronising (The Phantom Twin)
This co-developed multi-screened video installation is the latest part in the collaboration between Keh Ng and Matthew Stock as a response to the novel ‘The Man in the High Castle” by Philip k Dick.
The narrative within the narrative as utilised by Philip K Dick intertwines alternative realities that each vie for dominance. The first is set 17 years after the end of the Second World War, Germany and its Allies have won and the world has been divided. The second is held within ‘The grasshopper lies heavy’ a banned fictional novel that tells of a future where Germany and its Allies lost and the axis of power has shifted to resemble a structure not unlike our own post-modern world. It is this novel and its mysterious author that the protagonists in ‘The Man in the High Castle” are seeking answers from.
This duality creates slippages that the reader uncomfortably navigates through. It controls the reader’s ability to adequately define any clear understanding of what is real and what is not. This control of agency is further complicated by Dick’s use of the I-Ching, the book of changes. This ancient Chinese text utilises a divination system to attempt to gain insight into a question or a situation by way of a ritualistic process. The protagonists frequently consult the I-Ching in the hope of determining good from bad, success from failure.
It can be argued that the use of this divination ritualistic system, and the reading/interpreting of the banned novel is a defiant act that enables the protagonists to momentarily free them selves from the oppression of a dictatorial system and, importantly, in this moment gain agency.
Hexagram 11: The ritualistic body verses’ the de-bodied myopic wandering gaze.
Hexagram 28: A control system defining place and social narrative.
Hexagram 47: A dialogue that aims at dysfunction.
IMT Gallery
Unit 5
210 Cambridge Heath Road
London
E2 9NQ
7th August 2014
12 - 9pm, Drinks from 6pm
Filmarmalade is a publisher of visual theory