Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy

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.

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).