α. Notfiction is the visual, literary and ideal concretion of real and imagined worlds.

Notfiction is the continuation of an artistic, literary and mys-tical tradition in which the membrane between and around truth and fact, the explicit and the implicit, interpretation and actuality, is pliable, penetrable and osmotic. Mascots are many but include H.P. Lovecraft; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Lucian of Samosata; Jorge Luis Borges; Thomas More; Michael Moor-cock; Bruce Chatwin; Donald Evans; Umberto Eco; Isaac Newton; Hermann Hesse; Anthony Hope; Marcel Duchamp; Alfred Jarry; George MacDonald Fraser; John Milton; Erwin Schrödinger; Dmitri Mendeleev; Tom Johnson; Simon Fuji-wara; Meir Agassi; Fernando Pessoa; George MacDonald; Leon Gimpel; Franz Kafka; J.G. Ballard; and all authors of religious and quasi-religious texts.

β. Notfiction aspires to religion.Notfiction functions inside the theory that all storytelling aspires to religion in its intrinsic or extrinsic desire to influ-ence and to endure, and thus all stories are ultimately capable of becoming religions. Notfiction artefacts should therefore contrive to have a religious, scriptural or mythical aspect, or aspire to a religious, scriptural or mythical condition or context, whether reflective, conductive or generative. Correspondingly Notfiction artists may find it helpful to be mindful of exegesis and in particular the four Judaic PaRDeS when constructing a work, in order that the reader, as with religious artefacts, may be blessed with the opportunity, should they wish it, for endur-ing scholarly interpretation and its concomitant rewards.

γ. Notfiction is syncretic.Notfiction is not merely a sphere of activity within an artis-tic or literary system of storytelling; it is a storytelling system within which there are innumerable spheres of activity. Notfic-tion is thus an ongoing questioning of and a response to steam culture, in which fact and truth are interchangeable according to influence, and thus already closer to religion than technol-ogy. In Notfiction reality is defined by the influence on the individual as regarded by the individual: or, belief; analogous to the movements of the spheres according to their orbits, rota-tions and gravitational exertions upon each other and passing entities. Notfiction is therefore always mindful of the point of view, the art of perspective, and how such can be manipulated, moulded, interpreted, enjoyed and reiterated by both maker and reader in its artful plasticity.

δ. Notfiction is fluid.A work of Notfiction may be both implicit and explicit with-out necessarily acknowledging a spatial or temporal border between the two territories. Notfiction insists on this liquidity of logic: that ideas of deceit and conceit are matters of third-party perspective irrelevant to actuality; that a tide of illogic can be used to navigate willingly towards, rather than away from, the logical, and vice-versa; and that it is only practical to understand that a position, or perspective, is only germane when a position, or perspective, is manifest (uncertainty prin-ciple). Thus in its entirety a Notfiction artefact may embrace the ideal condition of metaparadoxy.

NOTFICTION MANIFESTO, 2012.

ε. Notfiction is material.Notfiction artefacts may take any form, but must exploit the material or paratext as a pre-requisite, as both a ready point of entry into the story for the reader and as a signpost toward ongoing investigations and scholarly interpretations. When making Notfiction artefacts artists should first question the form, and ask themselves what intrinsic values a material has that only that material can achieve, as in its materiality Notfic-tion requires full immersion by the reader, an effort equal to or greater than the effort of the maker, and this equation must be respected. Notfiction is thus Antichatter, demanding of time and effort of both maker and reader and disinclined toward premature syntheses.

ζ. Notfiction is nymical.‘Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities ... The breast and the body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads.’ (Hesse, Steppenwolf). Heteronyms, pseu-donyms, autonyms, eponyms, glossonyms &c. are thus among the most useful tools for the maker in the production of Notfic-tion artefacts.

η. Notfiction is the art of the apparent.Notfiction is conceit, but never a lie. Notfiction is deceit, but never a hoax. When it is conceit it is meant to be believed; when it is deceit is meant to be discovered. Notfiction is thus a mythographical enterprise: the knowing and simultaneous creation of both a Chimera and a Belerophon; entropy and its antidote; a truth and a lie; a maker and destroyer of its own world.

θ. Notfiction submits to the British Library.Notfiction has no value without at least one reader. Thus all Notfiction artefacts are catalogued with the British Library to enable future researches and interpretations. When an artefact is not a publication, a publication documenting the form and existence of that artefact must be made and submitted to the Library in sextuplicate.

NICHOLAS OF HITCHIN16-12-12