phi-fi

To us as to many others on the fringes of academia and fiction, the intertwined pathways of science fiction and philosophy are blatantly obvious. Indeed, fiction and philosophy are not so easy to separate. A renegade strand of thought from Nietzsche through Bataille to the CCRU have consistently blurred the lines between reality and fiction, surrealising the world in the terrifying and blissful knowledge that there is no reality. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly emphasise that conceptualisation is a wholly creative act- that philosophy is a speculative fiction and the will to imagination is the creation of worlds.

The best of science fiction - J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Philip K Dick and Ursula K Le Guin dismember the present to reveal the inherent presence of the future. The future literally is now and science fiction has always recognised this.

Phi-Fi then is a series of site-specific activities engaging in this form of practical philosophy. Targeting locations that are indicative of our hyper-real world, those that are the most contemporary zones of capitalism, we intend to use media to open up portals within so that other zones-of-now can be realised. We offer no moral high ground, no social policy and no political theory. We are as little interested in the left as we are the right and everything in between. We merely seek to punch holes in one reality to look at another. Like Ubik, this might become a never-ending process, an eternal hall of mirrors but since society has always been of the spectacle then we should push through the bland unimaginative visions of others into places darker, stranger and more ecstatic.

Strand # 1 - Olympic Phi-Fi

Olympic Phi-Fi tackles the controversial site of the London Olympic Stadium and sidesteps the various political debates by constructing an audio travelogue from the future. Participants can move around the venue and experience the potential of a parallel reality allowing the imagination to carve out new possibilities.

Olympic phi-fi will take place during the Society of Molecules (May 2009), an internationally distributed series of events organized through Brian Massumi and Erin Manning’s The Sense Lab, Concordia University, Montreal.

To track the development of the project follow the Olympic Phi-Fi Blog here.