Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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We can also turn in the other direction and look further back where the cut-up method dovetails with magickal practice per se (as, for example the various practices of Austin Osman Spare [Spare 2007]). Both exhaustion and ‘comfort’ can be understood as states, performances, landscapes, and conditions that constantly shape our understandings of the world around us – they all influence the ways in which we inhabit, and make space in it. It is, mercifully, a much easier read than A Thousand Plateaus, and is written with the calmness and lucidity of the best educators.

In Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy , David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan define and map instances of the practice they term ‘fictioning’, referring to acts of writing, imaging, performing and envisaging worlds or social bodies that diverge from dominant organisations of life. Het verbeelden van andere opvattingen over comfort betekent het verbeelden van andere sociopolitieke leefregels en manieren om ons tot de wereld te verhouden; het is een handeling met politieke urgentie. Fictioning’s structure seems at a first glance very neat and straightforwardly organized – three main sections each divided into two subsections with four to five chapters, covering what the authors indicate as the three myth-functions of contemporary art and philosophy: ‘Mythopoesis to performance fictioning’, ‘Myth-science to science fictioning’ and finally ‘Mythotechnesis to machine fictioning’.Almost written as a philosophical whodunit, the book ‘accelerates’ the reader through to the final outcome only to find herself at the end of the book together with the authors back at the beginning, as they, and I, still have questions. As the article from where the above quote is taken suggests, Q—who ‘drops’ information—is then not an individual, but a plot device that keeps the fiction going. He has contributed to a number of book projects and his exhibitions include Micro/Macro: British Art 1996–2002, Mucsanok, Budapest (2003); Take Me With You, Circulo des Bellas Artes, Madrid/Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006); All Over the New Smart, FA Projects, London (2008); Waving From Afar, Star Space, Shanghai (2009); The Diagram Banner Repeater, London/Torna, Istanbul (2011); In Outer Space There is No Painting and Sculpture, Summerhall, Edinburgh (2014); The Birmingham Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2014). Alongside this there is also the way these games emphasise the importance of perspective (and the shuttling between different perspectives) [13] and, with that demonstrate the fact that there are always worlds within worlds. We admit to proceeding as if fiction were reality; that is, proceed like Austin Osman Spare would have us do, through experimenting with believing in what we know might not be true.

Associated with artifice, invention and made-up stories, it is ordinarily understood as antithetical to factual, objective and true accounts of events, before their entanglement in the fickle inconstancy of human thought and invention. The book is thus, as they admit, not strictly ‘academic’; its concern is neither with history nor with analysis, despite the fact that both are present in the text, but with lines of flight and points of departure. They go on to discuss the financial fictions of the networked digital economy, artificial intelligence, accelerationist and decelerationist future fictions, and the techno-feminisms of VNS Matrix, Shulamith Firestone and Luciana Parisi. While creating and producing this project, our homes have acted as sites for production, rest, and rethinking comfort. Unlike Art in Theory, however, it has no pretentions to be a comprehensive compendium of historical sources for a general readership.Fictioning covers a vast amount of cultural and intellectual ground and digs deeply into the ideas encountered there. I’m thinking here of David Blandy’s The World After (2019) that allows for all sorts of non-human avatars and, more generally, foregrounds multispecies role-play (so allows a closer relation to non-human imaginaries). Het is om deze redenen dat ideeën en gebruiken rondom ‘comfort’ cruciaal zijn bij het verbeelden van een alternatieve toekomst. Reading Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy has brought me great joy . Bringing N Katherine Hayles’s conception of technogenesis to the ficto-criticism of Steve Goodman, the art of Ed Atkins and Jacolby Satterwhite and Greg Egan’s science fiction novel Permutation City, the authors attempt to answer the question: Can subjectivity exist without a body?

Their essay develops some of the same themes and insights as my own and, indeed, attends to the world building character of tabletop roleplaying games. Het collectieve project Fictioning Comfort bevat werken die een maatschappijkritische positie innemen door ‘fictioning’ (de handeling van verbeelden en uitbeelden) in relatie te brengen met verschillende gebruiken rondom ‘comfort’. At times the selection of material seems fragmentary and partial, the authors choosing those concepts and artworks which best illuminate their thesis. When the two of them suddenly realised that this was not simply a game, but something else altogether. But what Burrows and O’Sullivan emphasise, in both their writing and performance works, is that fictioning is intentionally orientated to challenge, subvert and transform our experience and understanding of social, technical and natural reality.In their essay Wolfendale and Franklin make a convincing case that although this aesthetic might have similarities with others—painting, theatre, literature—it is the way in which it is uniquely collaborative and dynamic that singles it out, or, in their words: ‘We experience this depth when we see the consequences of our choices spiral out of our control, producing interesting and unforeseen results, suggesting new and exciting ways in which the world can be filled in’ (Wolfendale and Franklin 2012: 219). Roleplaying games also demonstrate the ability we have, at least to some extent, to take on other fictions more generally. The structure of Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy seems at first glance very neat and straightforwardly organized—three main sections each divided into two subsections with four to five chapters covering what the authors indicate as the three myth-functions of contemporary art and philosophy: "Mythopoesis to Performance Fictioning," "Myth-Science to Science Fictioning" and finally "Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning. It was as if they had gone through a gate and, with that, had entered more fully into the characters (and the landscapes) they were playing. He is the co-author (with David Burrows) of Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2019); author of On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (Palgrave, 2012) and Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Palgrave, 2005); and co-editor (with Henriette Gunkel and Ayesha Hameed) of Futures and Fictions (Repeater, 2017) and (with Stephen Zepke) of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).