Imagining a Re-synchronising (The Phantom Twin) Part II

The Modern Language Experiment, in partnership with Filmarmalade, presented Imagining a Re-synchronising (The Phantom Twin). This co-developed multi-screen video installation was the latest part of the collaboration between Keh Ng and Matthew Stock, made in response to Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle.

The narrative within the narrative used by 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 from whom the protagonists in The Man in the High Castle seek answers.

This duality creates slippages that the reader uncomfortably navigates. 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 uses a divination system to gain insight into a question or situation through 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 ritualistic divination system, and the reading and interpretation of the banned novel, is a defiant act that enables the protagonists to momentarily free themselves from the oppression of a dictatorial system and, importantly, in this moment gain agency.

Hexagram 11: The ritualistic body versus the disembodied, myopic, wandering gaze.

Hexagram 28: A control system defining place and social narrative.

Hexagram 47: A dialogue that aims at dysfunction.

Filmarmalade is a publisher of visual theory.