The first phase of The Skullrcacker Suite ‘BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended)’ began as a one-month residency at Dynamo Arts Association in Vancouver in August 2016 where gallery was made into a research installation investigating the story of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s stay at a First Nations rehab clinic called X-Kalay.

‘Sketch 2 for a Time-Slip Installation’ is the second of two video works designed to be part of a future gallery installation. It combines found footage of early time-lapse cinema; a series of video postcards shot in Vancouver between 2001 and 2016; extracts from US Army espionage training films; time-lapse surveillance of the Special Investigations Room; and extracts from Robert Quine’s 1965 film Synanon about the experimental rehab community on which X-Kalay was modelled.

The first section takes Dick’s short story Colony, the first to be adapted for radio in 1956, as way to frame the historical colonization of Vancouver in retro-futurist SF terms. In the second section Dick discusses the theme invasive world take-over in his fictions from psychological and political perspectives and describes his experiences at X-Kalay. The video was published along with a research statement in The International Journal for Creative Media Research online special edition ‘Digital Ecologies: Fiction Machines’ in November 2020.