Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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This whirlwind of references (of which the bibliography of 26 pages is evidence) is further combined with what the authors state as the book's "necessarily different methods and speeds, operating on a variety of registers," which they feel is due to the fact that it is a collaboration. 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). 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. The semi-visible unsentence is a coded reference to the esoteric leanings of the two authors and their shared admiration for the art of Austin Osman Spare, the English artist-magician to whom they dedicate an early section of the book.

In the final section of the book, ‘Machine Fictioning: Analogue and Digital Life’, the authors discuss the notion of a coming technological singularity or super-intelligence which may render redundant the need for human embodiment. Accompanying mentions of more-often-than-not relatively obscure artists, the small black-and-white illustrations don't do the artists justice.We might say in this respect—and to bastardise Marx a little—that hitherto the philosophers have only talked about building worlds in various ways. As the kind of fictioning that is discussed by necessity moves away from what is already known, this fascinating and enriching journey, or performance, is strongly future oriented and thus maybe not surprisingly influenced by Deleuzian notions of becoming, including the interest in a "people to come. This exhaustion is consequential; we glamorise producing but overlook the exhaustion and even fatigue that might follow it.

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. Zowel uitputting als comfort kunnen begrepen worden als toestanden, performatieve handelingen, landschappen en condities die ons begrip van de wereld voortdurend vormen – ze beïnvloeden de manier waarop we leven en onze leefomgeving vormgeven. 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.

And in this sense role-play might also have resonances with what Viveiros de Castro says about perspectivism (see Viveiros de Castro 2014).

These relate to three specific modes of performance fictioning, science fictioning and machine fictioning. Fictioning makes a strong and sustained case for the pragmatic intimacy of the technological and aesthetic dimensions, and by extension the scholarly and the performative.

The third section, ‘Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning’, explores fictions about the interdependence and interpenetration of humans and machines and their collective techno-scientific ‘assemblages’. Each chapter involves, in other words, a kind of staging of a dialogue or confrontation between different fields through selected representative figures. 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.

De presentatie van Fictioning Comfort sluit goed aan bij de actuele situatie van een globale pandemie.

In particular the paper is concerned with how the docufiction can involve a presentation of landscape, broadly construed, alongside the instantiation of a complex and layered temporality which itself involves the foregrounding of other pasts and possible futures.