Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy - Paperback

by David Burrows (Author), Simon O'Sullivan (Author)

Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate that which does not exist. In this extensively illustrated book containing over 80 diagrams and images of artworks, David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan explore the technics of fictioning through three focal points: mythopoesis, myth-science and mythotechnesis. These relate to three specific modes of fictioning: performance fictioning, science fictioning and machine fictioning. In this way, Burrows and O'Sullivan explore how fictioning can offer us alternatives to the dominant fictions that construct our reality in an age of 'post-truth' and 'perception management'. Through fictioning, they look forward to the new kinds of human, part-human and non-human bodies and societies to come.

Front Jacket

Maps out the practice of fictioning as a new field of study for art and philosophy Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. In this extensively illustrated book containing over 80 diagrams and images of artworks, David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan explore the technics of fictioning through three focal points: mythopoesis, myth-science and mythotechnesis. These relate to three specific modes of fictioning: performance fictioning, science fictioning and machine fictioning. In this way, they explore how fictioning can offer us alternatives to the dominant fictions that construct our reality in an age of 'post-truth' and 'perception management'. Through fictioning, they look forward to the new kinds of human, part-human and non-human bodies and societies to come. -Explores the different ways that art practices deploy myth and fiction reality -Draws on a rich constellation of recent philosophical perspectives - including those associated with the speculative and ontological turns, non-philosophy, residual and emergent cultures, decolonisation and the posthuman -Moves through counter-cultures, performance studies, continental philosophy, anthropology, afrofuturisms, feminisms, science fiction, cybernetics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence research, electronic music and other digital practices -Ultimately argues that fictioning is at its most radical and experimental in the expanded field of contemporary art practice David Burrows is Reader in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Simon O'Sullivan is Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Together they are part of the performance fiction Plastique Fantastique.

Back Jacket

Maps out the practice of fictioning as a new field of study for art and philosophy Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. In this extensively illustrated book containing over 80 diagrams and images of artworks, David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan explore the technics of fictioning through three focal points: mythopoesis, myth-science and mythotechnesis. These relate to three specific modes of fictioning: performance fictioning, science fictioning and machine fictioning. In this way, they explore how fictioning can offer us alternatives to the dominant fictions that construct our reality in an age of 'post-truth' and 'perception management'. Through fictioning, they look forward to the new kinds of human, part-human and non-human bodies and societies to come. - Explores the different ways that art practices deploy myth and fiction reality - Draws on a rich constellation of recent philosophical perspectives - including those associated with the speculative and ontological turns, non-philosophy, residual and emergent cultures, decolonisation and the posthuman - Moves through counter-cultures, performance studies, continental philosophy, anthropology, afrofuturisms, feminisms, science fiction, cybernetics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence research, electronic music and other digital practices - Ultimately argues that fictioning is at its most radical and experimental in the expanded field of contemporary art practice David Burrows is Reader in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Simon O'Sullivan is Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Together they are part of the performance fiction Plastique Fantastique.

Author Biography

David Burrows is Reader in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. 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).

Simon O'Sullivan is Professor of Art Theory and Practice in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmith College, London. 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).