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We celebrated Philip K. Dick's 74th birthday with a
lecture-performance by techgnostic
scholar Erik Davis. Treating Dick as the supreme visionary
of California's crazy-wise spiritual imagination, Davis explored
the connections between Dick's pulp mindfucks and today's increasingly
surreal and disturbing political and religious landscape. The
second half of the program featured a rare 3D holographic
recording of Brother Lance, Arch Dickon in Anaheim's Holy Church
of VALIS, delivering
a sermon on Saint Phil versus the Media Archons.
Erik Davis is the author of TECHGNOSIS: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. He has written for Spin, Gnosis, Wired, Details, Fringeware Review, Rolling Stone, Lingua Franca, The Nation, and The Village Voice. He appeared in the Future Revisited Tentacle Session at the beginning of 2002, and will help usher out '02 with this celebration of Philip K. Dick's life and work, 20 years after the visionary science fiction writer's untimely death.
Philip K. Dick was a writer whose career largely centered on the
Bay Area, where he produced such landmark works of science fiction as THE
MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, TIME
OUT OF JOINT, and UBIK.
He also wrote a number of literary or mainstream novels such as
CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST and THE TRANSMIGRATION
OF TIMOTHY ARCHER. Since his death, his stories have been
adapted into a number of films, including BLADE RUNNER,
TOTAL RECALL, MINORITY REPORT, BARJO, IMPOSTER,
and SCREAMERS. His reputation, once largely confined
to the genre ghetto, has broken through into mainstream culture
and is frequently cited in the editorial pages of the New York
Times and by others attempting to make sense of the world we live
in.
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