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

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, 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.

Key Features

• 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