Ballardian

All Melbourne crew are welcome to come and heckle me this Wednesday (Dec 5, 1pm) at Monash University.

Image from Diet Soap #1. + Following on from my rapture at discovering the SurveillanceSaver software, here are some more portals onto mediated inner space. Chris Nakashima-Brown brings news of issue 1 of the fabulous zine, Diet Soap. The theme is Surveillance and there are poems, palindromes, fiction, reportage and lots of excellent collaged art, [...]

‘You call this a nation?’ Approaching Sealand (photo: Simon Sellars). While we’re on the subject of interstitial architecture, the concept of micronations could be said to be an example, especially when old, forgotten and disused structures slip through the cracks of nationalism. Sealand, a WWII gun platform in the North Sea, is perhaps the most [...]

A Donna Dennis ‘tourist cabin’, Park Avenue, New York. Photo: Peter Mauss/Esto. ‘Interstitial architecture’ has always held my attention and Ballard’s world is riddled with it, like the short story ‘Billennium’, with its discovery of the walled-away living room that represents ‘absolute spatial freedom’, a sign of hope in an overcrowded world where public and [...]

Image by Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez. The influence of BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh is spreading far and wide, so much so he is now featuring in a personality profile (disguised as a walking tour) in the Los Angeles Times in which the colour of his hair is discussed! Luckily, the writer, architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, [...]

Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell. Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere… J.G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights (1996). Every good Ballardian needs this: SurveillanceSaver, a [...]

I’ve just come across this excellent 2005 article from Chris Darke, published in Vertigo magazine, on Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece, Alphaville. It begins with a fascinating anecdote about gated communities in Brazil that are modeled after Godard’s modernist dystopia: Seven and a half miles from the heart of São Paulo there is a gated community which [...]

Initially, this story reminded me just a little of Ballard’s ‘Billennium’, set in a severely overcrowded future in which a group of friends find uninhabited space sealed off from the oppressive density outside… Eight artists snuck into the depths of Providence Place mall and built a secret studio apartment in which they stayed, on and [...]

Traven stumbled into a set of tracks left years earlier by a large caterpillar vehicle. The heat released by the weapons tests had fused the sand, and the double line of fossil imprints, uncovered by the evening air, wound its serpentine way among the hollows like the footfalls of an ancient saurian. … One question [...]

Yes, it’s Concrete Island all over again, according to the Telegraph, which tells us: A tramp who has lived in the middle of a Wolverhampton ring road for more than 30 years has become a Facebook phenomenon. Josef Stawinoga, aged in his eighties, is the subject of a fansite with more than 4,200 members. Titled [...]

Please forward to anyone that may be interested … TRIP: Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives Manchester, 19-22 June 2008. Call for Papers and Projects * * Psychogeography * * * Neogeography * * * Deep topography * * * Urban interventions * * * Locative media * * * Collaborative Mapping * * * Between June [...]

News of an installation in Oslo… Ann Lislegaard Crystal World ( after J.G Ballard ), 2006; Ann Lislegaard: Science Fiction and other worlds 26 May-26 August 2007 Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Dronningens gt 4, 0107 Oslo, Norway Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art has in recent years presented a series of exhibitions with [...]

Mac Tonnies is a Kansas-based writer of post-cyberpunk science fiction (recently published by the redoubtable Rudy Rucker). He’s also the author of the book After the Martian Apocalypse, a speculative search for life on the Red Planet, as well as the originator of a ‘cryptoterrestrial’ philosophy that ambitiously seeks to explain (with ‘balanced skepticism’) a [...]

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, directed by Peter Potter, is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of that name, produced as part of the BBC’s Out of the Unknown series of science-fiction dramatisations. But at that time film and television was just not capable of delivering the frisson that the best SF literature provided (it [...]

Paul emails to tell me of this news item: The European Space Agency (Esa) is after volunteers for a simulated human trip to Mars, in which six crewmembers spend 17 months in an isolation tank. They will live and work in a series of interlocked modules at a research institute in Moscow. Once the hatches [...]

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Michelle Lord has emailed me with some more information and stills from her show ‘Future Ruins’, now exhibiting at The Birmingham and Midland Institute, Margaret St., Birmingham B3 3BS UK. It’s on from June 15-23 and is part of Architecture Week 2007; see www.architectureweek.org.uk for further details. I’m fascinated [...]

Self-portrait: next to the M3 in Shepperton (photo: Simon Sellars). Apologies for the down time this site has experienced since the Ballard conference. I’m still in England where I’ve experienced many Ballardian and sub-Ballardian moments (and even some non-Ballardian moments, would you Adam and Eve it?) including exchanging views on ‘torture porn’ with Rick Poynor [...]

The UEA Studio: Conference Headquarters (photo: Simon Sellars). I attended From Shanghai to Shepperton: An International Conference on J.G. Ballard at the University of East Anglia on the weekend, and I’m suffering a bit of a comedown. I always get a bit melancholy when these temporary autonomous zones collapse and everyone returns to virtual communication. [...]

Back in 1986, Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) made an amusing cameo in Rodney Dangerfield’s fake-fart laden masterpiece Back to School. But did you also know that William Gibson appeared in Wild Palms alongside Jim Belushi; that Philip K. Dick guest-starred in a 1971 episode of Bewitched; that Jorge Luis Borges stole the show in an ep [...]

Over at BLDG BLOG, we’ve been invited to set up shop in a container city. A wonderful proposition, given that BLDG BLOG consistently honours Ballard’s urban disaster trilogy with the real-world architectural applications it so artfully maps out. From a recent BLDG BLOG post: I can’t end … without quoting J.G. Ballard; it’s like a [...]

What might have happened if J.G. Ballard had used his medical training to its fullest potential and become a doctor rather than a writer? Well, there would be no pen name for a start; ‘Jimmy Ballard’ would be a different man indeed, as Johnny Strike discovers. In this fascinating snapshot into an alternate Ballardian universe, [...]