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Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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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. 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. 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. 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. We have sat in our rooms, gradually sinking into the fiction of ‘being at home’ in the world, and attempting to extend beyond it.

The text finishes by predicting a future in which parafictional artists will become ubiquitous, and their growing numbers a possible threat.

The Diagram is of Gilbert Simondon’s modes of existence to highlight connections between magic, aesthetics and philosophy. But it seems to me that tabletop roleplaying games might also provide some insight here, not so much into the material production (or simply the abstract working out) but, once again, in foregrounding the importance of the imaginary in the inhabiting of another world and the importance of emotions in engaging with it (so, a kind of in-between—or diagonal—between the material and the abstract). A similar point might be made in relation to tabletop roleplaying games which are also more all-encompassing (although, again, age—pre-adolescence—has a role to play here). Inspired by the art of Sun Ra, the American jazz musician and pioneer of intergalactic Afrofuturism, Section II, ‘Myth-Science to Science Fictioning’, turns to modes of myth-making that run counter to the conventional theories of myth and science taught in universities.

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.Gezamenlijk met kunstenaars hebben we de urgentie van kunstproductie en distributie verkend, vooral in het licht van het zogenaamde ‘nieuwe normaal’ dat zowel in Nederland als daarbuiten in opkomst is. In the 513 pages that make up Fictioning, the reader comes across multiple figures, fields and temporalities: from Carlos Castaneda to Reza Negarestani; from Yucatán to Silicon Valley; from 1913 to extinction and the end of times.

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.There is, to begin with, the obvious problem of how to give a short evaluation of a book that not only is but also feels vast. It is for these reasons that ideas and practices of ‘comfort’ are crucial in imagining a different future world. Although it may appear to be a work of high-academic scholarship, it is also a kind of reality transforming spell.

Diagrams and the diagrammatic are shared concerns of the authors independently of their collaboration on Fictioning. Fictioning the landscape” also refers to the way in which these different space-times need to be performed in some way, for example with a journey through or to some other place as in a pilgrimage. This is even more the case with recent tabletop roleplaying games and, especially, those written by communities and/or as part of an art practice. Guy, Lesley (forthcoming), ‘Temporary Totalities: Creating Spaces for Collective Contemporary Art Practice’, PhD Dissertation, University of Northumberland.

But with role playing games there is an even closer occupation of a different imaginative space, and, again, an accompanying emotional aspect. Others are far apart: enjoying no historical connection, they are linked together through the mode of fictioning to which they belong or which belongs, I should say, to them, as when Austin Osman Spare, Robert Smithson and Yoyoi Kusama are examined together in Chapter Four, ‘Mirror Work: Self Obliteration’. And in this sense role-play might also have resonances with what Viveiros de Castro says about perspectivism (see Viveiros de Castro 2014).

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