The Tangent Factories: How can the cutting up and re-arranging of the work of Philip K Dick be useful in articulating new narratives for the role of intuition in painting?

The Tangent Factory is a practice-based PhD taking the form of a graphic novel (work in progress). I have cut-up (ala Burroughs, Gysin) and re-ordered the novels of Philip K Dick with the intention of creating new narratives helpful in updating our understanding of intuition in painting. The visuals of my graphic novel will be collage/painting hybrids made from highly enlarged sections of the P K Dick’s stories that have already been made into graphic novels such as Electric Ant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and a A Scanner Darkly.

The central questions within this research are as follows:


• How can hauntological approaches to world building help the formation of context and meaning in contemporary painting?

• Does fictioning open up new ways to explore an allusive subject like “intuition”?

• Can “intuition” be reimagined for a post-human context and how might this reading problematise existing assumptions of the role of intuition in painting?


Tangent Factories tells the surreal cut-up story of an art school in the future selling experience economy packages. Within the art school strange practices are carried out using carnivorous Ganymede Slime Molds that allow the participants to tap into flow states that literally take them outside of their subjectivity.
I intend to perform a short reading from the work whilst showing some “work in progress” visuals. I will unpack my methodology and approach, outlining some of the key concepts involved - such as Katherine N. Hayles' work on "Non-conscious Cognition" and Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow Theory” and touch on the notion of “Fictioning”, as theorised by Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrows (Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, 2019) and “Hauntology” discussed in many texts by Fisher, Jameson, Derrida etc.

Keywords: Hauntology, Fictioning, Non-conscious cognition, Intuition, Accelerationism, Philip K Dick, Alternative education, Futurism, Precognitive, Supersensible, Collage, Cut-ups, Mash-ups, Detournment, Painting, Science-fiction, Flow Theory.