Just what was Franz Kafka trying to say in his 1919 parable An Imperial Message?
Is it that no one will ever know the absolute truth? Or was the Czech writer telling us to stop dreaming and to get on with life as it is?
No matter how you interpret his short story, it is a source of fascination for Oliver Hockenhull, a Vancouver-based artist who works in film, video, hyper-media installations, writing and design.
For Culture Days at the Evergreen Cultural Centre, Hockenhull will display - for the first time - his project based on Kafka's parable, which goes something along these lines:
An emperor is dying and wants to pass on a message to the reader. He employs a go-between who struggles to convey the message. Even with the sign of the sun on his chest, the go-between still can't get through all the barriers. As a result, "he can never reach you, but you can find out what this dying person has to say to you by dreaming it for yourself," Hockenhull explained.
Using Kafka's text, Hockenhull will digitally project it onto the walls and windows - using images of outer space, in a kind of dream-like sequence - at the Coquitlam arts hub on Sunday from 3 and 5 p.m. And through an algorithmic syntactical program built in Java, Hockenhull will further layer Kafka's words in a reshuffled pattern.
The cut-up literary technique is nothing new as it was employed in 1919 by the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara.
And keeping with the 1919 theme, Hockenhull also plans to set his installation to Stravinsky's Octet, penned in 1919.
The year is significant to Hockenhull's installation because "it's just after World War One and there was real hope at the time that this would be a war that would end all wars," he said. "There was a real push in some ways to allow individuality, which was more important than the nation you came from."
A student of Kafka's writing for decades, Hockenhull said the author is one of the most prolific of the 20th century. "He had a magical and surreal way of looking at life, examining the relationship on societal structure and the liberated individual."
Asked what the viewer will get out of his somewhat-heavy installation, Hockenhull replied, "If I can get people to read Kafka and explore the value of words and their own imagination then I'm very happy."
ALSO AT ECC
Culture Days starts on Sunday at 1:30 p.m., with a classical, jazz and surf music concert by Reno Schembri and Azotar.
And at 4 p.m., Tri-City actor and writer Veenesh Dubois will present her one-woman play, Under the Mango Tree.
