The Ancient Device

'The Ancient Device' is the story of four somehow familiar, rather dishevelled, sometimes sympathetic characters: Hare, Fox-Owl, Ribbonhead and King John. We meet this dysfunctional and longing band of players on their journey to a site in the English landscape where they are to give a performance of sorts. Yet exactly who they are, where they are and what they are up to, becomes increasingly uncertain as the book draws us into the mist, exploring and experimenting with notions of narrative and plot, psychology and self, performance and place… Like the characters themselves, readers are unlikely to come out as they went in.   The Ancient Device is both a novel and an exploration of what the author calls the ‘fiction of the self’. The title of the book refers to this fiction that we all necessarily inhabit, but also to performance as a kind of device (and, indeed, the book as a device too). At stake in this exploration is also the development of an idea of ‘myth-work’ and how narrative and the laying out of imaginary landscapes and figures can work as a form of repair.

Table of Contents:
Trusting the body, Notes on practice, Notes on reading, A conversation, I Disrupting the human, 1. Moving without the head on top, 2. Moving without standing upright, 3. Moving without the hands, 4. Moving from the pelvis, 5. Moving from the spine, 6. Moving the face, 7. Disrupting the human shape, 8. Questioning with the body, 9. Finding your edge, 10. Not slow or fast, in time, 12. Demystifying agency, II Being environment, 12. Landing, 13. Softening boundaries, 14. Moving in landscape, 15. Tuning to nature’s rhythm, 16. Shapeshifting frames, 17. Un-shaping with environment, 18. Becoming less human, 19. Moving with human design, 20. Being with, 21. Embracing impermanence, A feral human, Acknowledgments, About the Author

About the Author :
Professor Simon O’Sullivan lives in East Sussex and teaches at Goldsmiths College in London.   Simon is a theorist and artist working at the intersection of contemporary art practice, performance and philosophy. He has published widely in in these areas, often in relation to Deleuze and Guattari and, more recently in relation to fictioning and myth-work. His most recent monographs are From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair (2024) and (written with David Burrows) Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (2019). His collaborative art practice – with David Burrows, Alex Marzeta and Vanessa Page, sometimes with and others – comes under the name Plastique Fantastique, a ‘performance fiction’ that involves an investigation into aesthetics, subjectivity, the sacred, popular culture and politics produced through, performance, film and sound work, comics, text, installations and assemblages. Plastique Fantastique have performed and exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and are represented by IMT Gallery in London.   Other writings can be found at: www.simonosullivan.net   He is also part of the performance collaboration/collective Plastique Fantastique: www.plastiquefantastique.org