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. Rohtmaa-Jackson (Blue Mountain Arcturus) (2022), ‘Citadel of Chaos: An Art Practice to Materialise an Alternate Present’, Vector, August 24 2022, available at: https://vector-bsfa. De presentatie van Fictioning Comfort sluit goed aan bij de actuele situatie van een globale pandemie. With an extended introduction by the editors, the book invites reflection on how fictions proliferate, take on flesh, and are carried by a wide variety of mediums—including, but not limited to, the written word. The structure of Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy seems at first glance very neat and straightforwardly organized—three main sections each divided into two subsections with four to five chapters covering what the authors indicate as the three myth-functions of contemporary art and philosophy: "Mythopoesis to Performance Fictioning," "Myth-Science to Science Fictioning" and finally "Mythotechnesis to Machine Fictioning.

His book Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex (MIT/Strange Attractor, 2017) explores the uses of Haiti as a locus for Euro-American fears about African culture, spirituality and revolutionary excess in the Americas, and their sublimation into popular horror tropes. In relation to the intersections and interferences between screen-based games and contemporary art practice see Jamie Sutcliffe’s curated show ‘Trouble in Outer Heaven: Portable Ops Plus’, at Southwark Park Galleries in 2021 and his accompanying essay ‘Vocal Cord Parasite’ (Sutcliffe 2021a). 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 mythopoesis, myth-science and mythotechnesis. Fictioning’s structure seems at a first glance very neat and straightforwardly organized – three main sections each divided into two subsections with four to five chapters, covering what the authors indicate as the three myth-functions of contemporary art and philosophy: ‘Mythopoesis to performance fictioning’, ‘Myth-science to science fictioning’ and finally ‘Mythotechnesis to machine fictioning’.

Their essay develops some of the same themes and insights as my own and, indeed, attends to the world building character of tabletop roleplaying games. Might it also be that these games worked especially well in the pre-internet age (insofar as there was less competition, for example, from social media)? There is another definition of LARPing that connects my comments in this essay—about tabletop roleplating games and fictioning—with QAnon and a wider politics of post-truth.

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.This is a book about loops, the fictional and the real, the virtual and the actual, the past that never was and the people yet to come – and how to occupy them, to live in the in-between, summon demons, talk to cats, compose new temporalities, all in the name of building a future so alien that none of us could even imagine what it might be like.

These relate to three specific modes of performance fictioning, science fictioning and machine fictioning. Alongside this there is also the way these games emphasise the importance of perspective (and the shuttling between different perspectives) [13] and, with that demonstrate the fact that there are always worlds within worlds. On the one hand home is a space of production of work, experiencing exhaustion and fatigue, and resting of the (tired) bodies. 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. We can also turn in the other direction and look further back where the cut-up method dovetails with magickal practice per se (as, for example the various practices of Austin Osman Spare [Spare 2007]).Both exhaustion and ‘comfort’ can be understood as states, performances, landscapes, and conditions that constantly shape our understandings of the world around us – they all influence the ways in which we inhabit, and make space in it.

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. Fictioning" here alludes to "an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence" and thus not to fiction writing per se, but the book turns out to be just as unputdownable as the best novel you can lay your hands on or as hypnotic as Plastique Fantastique's tunes for that matter.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 then there are also those other accounts of world building we get with philosophers like Alain Badiou (see Badiou 2009 and my discussion in O’Sullivan 2012)—or any of the more recent writings on world making, especially those which follow a more abstract and conceptual—or diagrammatic—logic (there seems to be a particular attention to this within certain theory worlds at the moment, which is to say, at the moment when our present world seems increasingly bankrupt).