ρan-ρan

Preface: Prof Simon O'Sullivan
Outro: Dismal Swamp

This boke of theory-fiction consists of six chapters, split into three parts.

All six chapters are set in a larger @neoflagellants’ con-world. Because this neo-medieval conworld provides a non-linear narrative within which all of our work operates, the boke connects with other works in the @neoflagellants corpys as well as the medievalisms of other scholars and artists (what Simon O’Sullivan terms fictioning’s practice of ‘world-building’). It remains evident, however, that the boke is set in our own non-modern ‘middle’, that it concerns the medievalisms we continue to inhabit, how they came to be and where they might be heading.

Our boke is predicated on a fictional corpys that consists of three parts: Part A: The Corpys (Protocanonical), Part B: The Imitation Doxa (Deuterocanonical), Part C: Let us know about anything wrong, or anything you don’t like about this review, and you could win a $50 Amazon voucher! (Hermeneutics/Scriptorium)

Preface i): This Dismal Swamp

Preface ii): Professor Simon O'Sullivan

Part A The Corpys (Protocanonical)

1. Voices of the Future Dead
2. Trial by Future Dead

Part A of pan-pan consists of two Chapters that establish a fictive epistemology derived from the boke’s ontology corpys/ontology. We have developed a way of writing with generative adversarial networks (GAN) that is akin to the role performed by an oracle.

This deliberately restricted protocanonical corpys is the basis of the entire boke’s ontology. This section fictions a research methodology, then generates quantitative and qualitative ‘data’ using these fictional methods in the search for a ‘tru corpys’ of knowledge. The data generated constitutes a key part of the boke’s protocanonical corpys. Mixing the Scholastic method with assemblage theory and GAN, this data has been re-animated to perform a neomedieval trial of itself.

Chapter 1: Voices of the Future Dead: The first chapter is a hermuenetic fiction that expands and develops an @neoflagellants track we released with Punctum Records in 2014. The episode is composed using an EVP field recorder to jammmmm radio static into ‘voices of the future dead’. The voices are transcribed. The transcriptions are then developed into a research methodology using the medieval Scholastic method (which, of course, assumed that there is a very limited corpys of knowledge). In our case this is the aforementioned @neoflagellants protocanonical corpys.

Chapter 2: ‘Trial By Future Dead’ is based on a work @neoflagellants made for #MAM02017. It animates the voices of the future dead in the form of a medieval deodand trial. The deodand on trial is a $50 Amazon Gift Voucher Polyresin Rooster assemblage, the plaintiff a dead Fox represented via Electronic Voice Phenomenon. The trial practices anachronistic research methods of ‘compurgation’ and ‘ordeal’ to investigate the veracity of testimony developed using GAN in ways that implicitly relate to current new materialist debates.

Part B: The Imitation Doxa (Deuterocanonical)

The second part of the boke features three episodes of ‘Scripture’. It draws on recent anthropological research into fiction-based religions as well as fictioning and feminist research on depression/acedia.

The three chapters in this section are written from the particular perspective of a different narrator:

Chapter 3. Muller Ltd.
Chapter 4. WeRLtd!
Chapter 5. MInTOone80Five

The narrators (Solution Aligners) are recurring characters within the @neoflagellants conworld and are known to perform neomedieval, neo-materialist and ‘weird’ methodological, epistemological and ontological biases. Each performs in a different narrative point-of-view (ala Percy Lubbock). The narrators account for the object-history of a group of key character-things and person-objects (which we call avatars). The avatars have already been established in previous @neoflagellants works.

Each chapter is performed in a different literary genre mash-up (in-flight magazine profile/seeker pitch, wanderjahre/game walkthrough, pharma/WWF Battle) written with GAN and SSRI ‘partial-assist’. The chapters were written in, and are set in, a conflation of under/overground Canadian mall-networks: REŚO (Montréal), PATH (Toronto), Minto 185 (Ottawa) and the +15 (Calgary). Each chapter develops different aspects of the fictive epistemology established in Part A into a belief system resembling A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Part C: (is also Chapter 6) Let us know about anything wrong, or anything you don’t like about this review, and you could win a $50 Amazon voucher! (Hermeneutics/Scriptorium)

The final part/chapter of the boke is a series of hyper-economic ‘reviews’ - in the threefold hermeneutic modes of allegoricus, moralis, anagogicus - that Confraternity of Neoflagellants wrote and posted on amazon.ca (our ‘Scriptorium’) for items and services (actants) that we have purchased since 2015. Since the items are actants in Part A and Part B of the boke, the amazon.careviews constitute a form of ‘relic-ing’. For us, art that practices the cultural biography of things, (re)locates, implaces and authenticates the object as ‘a relational hub or conduit within a network of inter-human subjectivities.’ (Neoflagellants 2013, 189) In this chapter, we assemble the hyper-economic relic-ing of actants in the amazon.ca Scriptorium and adjust their exegesis to align with the epistemology GAN-fictioned in Parts A and B to produce a factive assemblage.