Fictioning: Mythopoesis, Myth-Science and Mythotechnesis
Simon O'Sullivan

My talk will address the performance of fictions. In particular, I will be interested in how such practices (of what I call fictioning) can open up other worlds from within this one and how this might constitute a ‘counter-strategy’ against today’s post-truth and post-fact political terrain. I will also introduce my wider collaborative research project (carried out with David Burrows) on mythopoesis/myth-science/mythotechnesis, attending to a historical sequencing between these but also, more importantly, to the idea of temporal loops operating between different pasts, presents and futures.

Simon O’Sullivan is Professor of Art Theory and Practice in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has published two monographs with Palgrave, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (2012), 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). He also makes art, with David Burrows and others, under the name Plastique Fantastique – and is currently working on a collaborative volume of writings, with Burrows: Fictioning: The Myth-Function of Contemporary Art and Philosophy.