Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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Unlike Art in Theory, however, it has no pretentions to be a comprehensive compendium of historical sources for a general readership.

This paper develops a concept of fictioning when this names, in part, the deliberate imbrication of an apparent reality with other narratives. And the business of being a twin—of having your ‘double’ occupy the other position—also raises interesting questions and insights as regards the shuttling between different perspectives which is partly what these games seem to allow. See for example Lesley Guy’s work on roleplaying games and collective art practices and as part of the collective Totaller (Guy forthcoming). The presentation of Fictioning Comfort is in thoughtful correspondence with the circumstances of our world today during the pandemic crisis. 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.That said, I have recently taken on the role of a Games Master for my own two sons and have now watched them enter into what always seemed to me another space-time. Again, it’s not exactly that a material reality is altered—although there might be aspects of that reality that is changed—and more that a symbolic and imaginary (and emotional) change can take place. 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. Tijdens de totstandkoming van dit project dienden onze huizen als plekken voor productie, rust en het nadenken over de betekenis van ‘comfort’. The collective project Fictioning Comfort includes works that take an urgent socio-political stance by fictioning ideas and practices of ‘comfort’.

This is part of Reed’s larger project—carried out across recent writings—to affirm ‘the difference between the making of a common world vs. This essay discusses the work of a series of imaginary artists who are, nevertheless, able to function as authors in the contemporary art world. This certainly resonates—but, I think, also adds something—to, for example, Donna Haraway’s interest in ‘string figures’ and communities of world building (Haraway 2016). For specialists in the fields traversed this may be frustrating and Fictioning is unlikely to satisfy those hoping to deepen their knowledge of the philosophers it addresses.Fictioning’ is the word Burrows and O’Sullivan use to describe a mode of making, writing and thinking that operates, like their own, between multiple fields of creative practice and philosophy. If I have not referenced it throughout it is only because I came across it after I had written my own draft. As in the previous chapters, the philosophical analysis is carefully woven into the discussion of a range of contemporary artists and works, notably the experimental music collective To Live and Shave in LA and the musician Rudolf Eb.

Almost written as a philosophical whodunit, the book "accelerates" this reader through to the final outcome only to have her find herself at the end of the book together with the authors back at the beginning—as they, and I, still have questions. From the scale of living bodies, to landmasses, and even on a planetary one – our world is saturated with processes and relations that are exhausting. Role playing games can allow for more radical experiments in shifting perspectives in this sense (and thus for more radical world building).

The Diagram is of Gilbert Simondon’s modes of existence to highlight connections between magic, aesthetics and philosophy.

O’Sullivan’s book On The Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) is constructed upon series of diagrams drawn from philosophy and psychoanalysis.Written very much against the grain of canonical art history and theory – at least in its conservative, patriarchal and traditionalist modes – Fictioning functions more like a critical sourcebook for a visionary arts education yet-to-come. He is the author of the monographs 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 is 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). Kortom, thuis kan worden gezien als een omgeving waar uitputting en comfort met elkaar vervlochten zijn. Reading Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy has brought me great joy; its review, however, not so much. Metzinger, Thomas (2009), The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, New York: Basic Books.