Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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The selection and range of authors, artists and artworks used to illuminate their thesis is impressive and compelling, and despite the necessary brevity with which some of the references are treated, it is rarely to the detriment of the core ideas and values contained within them. By using the term fiction as a verb we refer to the writing, imaging, performing or other material instantiation of worlds or social bodies that mark out trajectories different to those engendered by the dominant organisations of life currently in existence.

Such a weighty and floppy paperback tome will be reminiscent of two other books, dusted off the shelves during the essay marking season in establishments of higher (art) education: Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and Harrison and Woods Art in Theory 1900–2000. On the one hand home is a space of production of work, experiencing exhaustion and fatigue, and resting of the (tired) bodies.In each case, fiction is bound up with the production and modulation of desire, the enfolding of matter and meaning, and the blending of practices that cast the existing world in a new light with those that participate in the creation of new openings of the possible. Het is om deze redenen dat ideeën en gebruiken rondom ‘comfort’ cruciaal zijn bij het verbeelden van een alternatieve toekomst.

One is the Games Master who has initially built or, really, written the world—even if they are using a pre-prepared scenario, they need to add detail, narrate the encounters, bring the world to life (I should also say here that my experience was that these worlds were always more successful when written by the Games Master). Following a broadly historical arc, Fictioning is organised into three overlapping sections, each subdivided into paired variations on the theme. This exhaustion is consequential; we glamorise producing but overlook the exhaustion and even fatigue that might follow it.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. Fictioning the landscape” also refers to the way in which these different space-times need to be performed in some way, for example with a journey through or to some other place as in a pilgrimage. It is, mercifully, a much easier read than A Thousand Plateaus, and is written with the calmness and lucidity of the best educators. Quite an over-the-top statement, but for a time it really was as if this were the case for me (as it is for them now).

There is also much more to say about this, but it is not just my own story and so I leave it to one side—except to draw something important from this determining factor: there were always two of us (at least) and so there was always already a community and a discourse happening around these experiences and this world creation. The deadpan cover of David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan’s Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the authors’ parallel lives as the creators of Plastique Fantastique, the performance art group whose multi-sensory, neo-pagan, anarcho-sci-fi performance-rituals have been warping art audience sensoria since 2004. Thanks to the British Science Fiction Association, the Sussex Humanities Lab (Open Practice Group), and the University of Sussex School of Media, Arts and Humanities. We are always already involved in role play—or, put differently there is always something else playing us.Biographical Fictioning, an Art Writing Spring School Open Masterclass (7-8 April 2022), focused on creative approaches to biographical, memoir, and life-writing. The third section, ‘Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning’, explores fictions about the interdependence and interpenetration of humans and machines and their collective techno-scientific ‘assemblages’. The question is unpacked in relation to speculative hypotheses about the future of consciousness in a post-biological world.