Retroactive Collaboration Stephanie nova Milne Richard nova Milne MFA Research COFA2245 August 2010 ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’ Signed …………………………………………….............. Date ……………………………………………................. ! 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Date …………………………………………….............................. AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT ‘I certify that the Library deposit digital copy is a direct equivalent of the final officially approved version of my thesis. No emendation of content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are the result of the conversion to digital format.’ Signed ……………………………………………........................... Date ……………………………………………........................... Abstract This research document forms the conjecture for a working process we have collectively developed and executed in a number of Ms&Mr works since 2007. Retroactive Collaboration is defined as the event of reworking found material belonging to a subject’s former self in the pursuit of transforming and transgressing the personal archive. We connect the imagined possibilities of Time Dilation, the phenomena described by Einstein’s relativity, with the collapse of past, present and future biographical material to form alternate relational scenarios.! ! 3! Contents Introduction – Retroactive Collaboration 1. Found Apophenia 2. Time Out Of Joint (Camembert of Space-time) 3. Two Clocks: Time Dilation 4. The Video Message: I Am Alive and You Are Dead 5. Posthumous Duets in a Polychronic World 6. Plastic Brain Conclusion - The Rashomon Effect Image Citations Bibliography Endnotes Introduction – Retroactive by Einstein’s relativity, with the collapse Collaboration Ms&Mr is our collective of past, present and future biographical voices, Stephanie nova Milne and material, to form alternate relational Richard nova Milne. scenarios. The following paper outlines the conceptual rationale behind a way of The aims of such scenarios are to working with archival material, which we confound the constraints of chronology refer to as Retroactive Collaboration. and thereby explore the philosophical This approach to making is evident in a and psychological outcomes that entails. number of our works made since 2007. The following paper, doesn’t specifically examine what these outcomes are, Retroactive Collaboration defines the rather, it is research documentation for event of reworking found material the process of thinking about how these belonging to a subject’s former self, in new relationships can be formed through order to transgress the personal archive. the act of Retroactive Collaboration. We We connect the imagined possibilities of conjecture that Retroactive Collaboration Time Dilation, the phenomena described forms a kind of domestic science fiction. ! 4! 1. FOUND APOPHENIA once fabricated fiction on his There are rare moments amidst the typewriter, he was now purely scepticism of modern existence when transcribing messages from a divine we feel optimistic about timing, as entity, towards some penultimate strata though random collisions of events or of truth. ideas form an index of coincidences that if one was either superstitious or paranoid enough, could even be read as signs. The neurological term for such a phenomena is Apophenia. As the authors thinking about the research that follows, the work and biography of Philip K. Dick enters many of our conversations. Initially, we think of Dick’s post-1974-revelatory years and the period to which his novel writing slowed in favour of an fig. 1 obsessive spinning of hypothesisi. During this time, he developed the During his 1974 period, Dick was living cumulative daily practice of note taking as a double, reflecting an obsession and lucid dreaming that was since with twinning that harked back to the discovered to amount to over 80 000 loss of his own sister as a baby. His written pages. When proselytizing to selves were divided into the “Phil K. acquaintances, Dick often referred to Dick” self and “Thomas”, a persecuted this work as his “Exegesis” and a great Christian in Rome 1st Century A.D. It part of it has posthumously been occurs to us that if one suspends any published under that title. Emmanuel notion of Dick’s psychological space, Carrère, a biographer of the late writer, that his perceived two-headed and presumes that Dick referred to it as alter-historical practice is a useful such because he was well aware of the maquette. It reflects the complex array words’ precise meaning, as a doctrinal of inter-authorial and inter- interpretation of a sacred text. It is also chronological relationships, whose well documented that during this time, consideration is required in the reading Dick believed he’d found himself in the of our work and of this collaborative exact predicament of one of his paper. In practice, our Retroactive fictional characters, receiving infallible Collaboration is not an attempt to messages from God, or the more translate messages from VALIS; Dickian, “VALIS”. Dick had an however, our domestic approach to overwhelming notion that where he ! 5! science fiction involves the transcribing of archival texts. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my As a practical definition, Retroactive preoccupation with these pluriform, Collaboration is the act of reworking pseudo worlds, but now I think I anything from a past point of personal understand. What I was sensing was the archaeology. Frequently, it is the use of manifold of partially actualised realities VHS home movies, either taken of or lying tangent to what evidently is the most by the subject. However, it is not actualised one; the one which the majority limited to this, and includes childhood of us by consensus gentium agree on.iii drawings, writing, notes, objects etc. By re-engaging with another version of one of our selves, we are attempting to decode another reality and bring it into a collaboratively assumed, multi- perspective present. Philip K. Dick’s interest in the metaphysical lead him to perceive his fig. 2 works as a way of uncovering a certain truth by revealing alternate realities. Dick also revealed in the same speech, Early on, he had become interested in the crossover he had experienced the philosophical concept of the idios between autobiographical events and kosmos, the subjective version of his fiction. reality all of us carry in our own heads, and koinos kosmos. The koinos … it’s a common theme in my writing, that kosmos, strictly speaking, doesn’t a dark-haired girl shows up at the door of actually exist; rather it is our perception the protagonist and tells him that his world of an objective reality, a form of is delusional, that there’s something false convention that we must agree upon, ‘a about it. Well, this did finally happen to diplomatic fiction’ii. It may be based on me. I even knew that her hair would be what others can commonly understand, black. I had an actual complete sense of but that would be to presume that what she would look like, and what she others truly exist. would say. She did appear, she was a total stranger and she did inform me of this fact. In what many saw as a profession of That some of my fictional works were in a madness, in 1977, Dick delivered a literal sense true.iv speech at the Science Fiction convention in Metz, that we have Similarly, in Retroactive Collaboration, assumed as a surrogate artist talk. documentary and science fiction aren’t ! 6! mutually exclusive. The filmmaker The novel takes place in an imagined Werner Herzog declared in his future of a ‘North American Lessons of Darkness (1992) a very Confederation' in 1992, where useful term, he calls ecstatic truth. technology has advanced considerably, enabling civilian space travel, and psi There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, phenomena like telepathy, and a form of and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic cryogenics. In Ubik this cryogenic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can process enables freshly deceased be reached only through fabrication and humans to be put into a form of imagination and stylization.v suspended life in moratorium. This state is called half-life, or more informally Herzog, like Dick, is propelled by a ‘cold-pac’, as the person is immobile but desire to penetrate beyond superficial has limited consciousness and can be truths.