Ballardian

Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopian account of consumerism as a type of ’soft fascism’, received lukewarm reviews and suggestions that the author was, perhaps, finally losing his touch. Others were eager to point to parallels between it and events around us: aggressive car commercials, racist behaviour by sports fanatics. In this article, Mike Holliday re-examines Kingdom Come and asks: can we really equate consumerism with fascism?

Nicholas Cobb’s architectural model of a corporate campus, photographed with a malevolent, dystopian flair, and exploring parallel themes to Ballard’s Super-Cannes.

Probably of no interest to anyone but me, but here goes: top 10 most-read posts on ballardian.com in 2009; top 10 search-engine phrases leading visitors to the site in 2009; and top 10 links from other sites in 2009.

JG Ballard’s writing encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis, technological fetishism, urban ruination and suburban mob culture. In this extract from the September-October issue of Architectural Design, Nic Clear explores how Ballard’s understanding of architecture and architects made him one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns.

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor.

Reprints of three book reviews originally published elsewhere. The reviews discuss The BLDGBLOG Book (2009) by Geoff Manaugh, City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (2007), edited by Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge, and JG Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (2009) by Jeannette Baxter.

Readers hoping to solve the mystery of J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Beach Murders’ may care to approach it in the form of a card game. Some of the principal clues have been alphabetized, some left as they were found, scrawled on to the backs of a deck of cards. Readers are invited to recombine the order of the cards to arrive at a solution. Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and the final answer to the mystery lies forever hidden.

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’
by Brian Baker

..:: CONTINUED from >> Part 1 ::…

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The Joker. The Joker in the pack is the card that, in some games, can replace (or substitute for, take the place of) any of the others. In this sense, the Joker is the empty sign.
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Hearts ♥
(A♥) Time Drill. ‘I don’t remember much [...]

“As Michael Jackson reached middle age, the skin of both his cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. His naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along his jaw fell forward. His jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of his neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex.”

Simon Sellars, Mel Chilianis and Melb Psy take an audiovisual tour of Melbourne’s Crown Casino, seeking to map the coordinates of this micronational zone — consumer-driven control space with a raging need.

Nic Clear leads the remarkable Unit 15 course on the built environment at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. In this interview, Nic explains the course’s focus on the work of Ballard as a way to counter the lamentable state of current discourse on architecture. The article includes clips of six stunning films produced by students as part of this Ballard-inspired methodology.

Announcement of the new Ballard World theme park in Dubai, following on from the Egypt, London and Shanghai versions.

A group of Sydney architects are doing their best to rob us of a Ballardian future.

Mike Bonsall sets out on a mission to find The Real Concrete Island, and is surprised by what he finds: ‘Ballard must have walked the same streets that years later I was to haunt with my own damaged crew. Living within sight of the Westway, which I felt must have helped form his motorway mythology, I was moved to do some geo-detective work…’

Dan O’Hara back-translates a brief interview with J.G. Ballard, originally published in French in 1975. Here, Ballard discusses the research he did into the link between criminal behaviour and urban environments, a seed of insight that would sustain his writing right up until Kingdom Come.

A man shrugs off the clucking of his family and makes his way to International Departures. With the ticketing formalities over, he slumps at the bar and orders drinks. A flat, synthetic boarding call and he remembers his trip: ‘Last call for Silverwing 501. Please make your way to Gate 23.’

BLDGBLOG on Ballard, resampled architecture, homogenous global space and Michael Winterbottom.

I’ve finally captured my impressions of Barcelona and Kosmopolis, with main ingredients: Lou Reed, Claire Walsh, Laurie Anderson, Kafka, Brecht, Dali, brilliant public space, Ballard, and the sheer unbridled thrill of one of the most amazing cities in Europe.

Here are some preliminary thoughts from the city of Barcelona, where I am appearing on a panel to talk about the work of J.G. Ballard as part of the Kosmopolis literary festival.

Solveig Nordlund’s Ballard adaptation, Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, is rooted in reality, as this report on Spain’s ghost towns demonstrates.

Announcement for Owen Hatherley’s new book, Militant Modernism.

Jamie Sherry reviews a unique on-screen adaptation of Ballard’s work, now showing on BallardoTube: the Italian animation, Grande Anarca, based on JGB’s 1985 short story, ‘Answers to A Questionnaire’. Can the filmmakers succeed where other, big-name suitors have failed — decanting Ballard’s experimental literary narratives into a more linear cinematic language? Or does Ballard resist classification yet again?

This is a review of John Foxx’s Melbourne performance of Tiny Colour Movies, his found-film collection and live soundtrack. For the reviewer, witnessing this may have solved a two-year-old puzzle; certainly, it brought everything full circle back to Ballard.

Ballard & Eno: quite possibly the ‘two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century’.

London film screening featuring ‘futuristic visions of London’ and ’surreal urban worlds’.

The music of kode9 and Burial: just how ‘Ballardian’ is it? We investigate the viral spread of this apparent internet meme, detouring via Crash, The Drowned World and ‘The Sound-Sweep’.

Drained swimming pools are a staple in Ballard’s work, and also the subject of photographer Gigi Cifali’s latest series.

Film and media studio floods London 82 years hence, evokes Ballard.

Where can one find the world’s strangest housing communities? Here is a handy list.

Troy Paiva’s desert photography evokes the crumbling, decadent resorts and enervated cityscapes of Ballard’s Vermilion Sands and Hello America stories. Enjoy this interview with Troy, the Light-Painter of Mojave D.

More Bluewater, less Ballard according to Michael Collins.

“Iain, I want you to blow up Bluewater.”

For this upcoming exhibition, the International Project Space in Birmingham will be transformed into the J.G. Ballard Centre for Psychopathological Research, “an institute built to interrogate the New Psychology explored in Ballard’s fiction.”

Information on a forthcoming exhibition at The University of Texas at Dallas School of Arts and Humanities, inspired by Ballard and The Atrocity Exhibition.

MelbPsy gets all Atrocity Exhibition on the House that Sam Newman built, the ‘tabloid architecture’ sheathing yet another backyard Aussie micronation.

I’ve been asked to contribute to a documentary on car parks. Here then, as preparation, is my Ballardian Primer to Car Parks, with quotes from Ballard’s novels.

infinite thØught takes a Ballard-inspired tour of Bluewater, one of the inspirations for JGB’s Kingdom Come.

Could it really be possible that a Japanese manga artist was influenced by J.G. Ballard’s most obscure novel?

This post is given over to recent links readers have sent me. ‘Ballardian’ or not? You decide.

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG fame is giving a lecture tonight at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, home of the innovative built-environment module, Unit 15, led by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy. I’m sure Ballard will pop up somewhere in Geoff’s talk. Not only have I previously interviewed Geoff about the intersections between JGB [...]

Dan O’Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a German mixed-media radio play based on High-Rise. Transposing the novel to Berlin in 2013, it references Nazism, notably Speer’s social engineering through architecture, on its way to exploring Ballard’s relevance to speculative models of German life.

According to Dan Lockton, one of the many ‘obsessions’ running through Ballard’s work is the effect of architecture on the individual. More than playful psychogeography, Ballard dissects architectural influence on his characters with technical precision.

Geoff has posted a fabulous interview with monumental SF/utopian author Kim Stanley Robinson over at BLDGBLOG. Robinson responds to Geoff’s fresh perspective…

According to William Viney, Crash presents a barrage of images that expresses collapse, dereliction, and waste; a seemingly endless carnival of sex and destruction; intoxicating, perverting, and desensitizing the reader, while Empire of the Sun can be seen as the terminus of Ballard’s treatment of waste, the epitome of all that has gone before. Although Ballard’s other works deal with the subject of death and the disposal of corpses, Empire of the Sun attempts to cope with this disposal on a mass-scale, or rather, during both war and peace, it explores the complex transition between the valued human being and lifeless, disposable cadaver.

William Viney explores how High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City” contain familiar visual landscapes. However, each of these recognisable aspects of urban experience is rendered unfamiliar through the pervasive renegotiation of waste categories.

This is an English translation of an interview with J.G. Ballard by Alexander Gutzmer, originally published in German by Welt am Sonntag, 3 June 2007.

Recently, Toronto’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy passed on to Rick McGrath a binder containing a slew of Canadian JGB reviews, Ballardian esoterica and the jewel in the crown: a long, unpublished interview with Ballard from 1974.

Here’s an interview with Ballard fom June this year. It was conducted by Alexander Gutzmer and published by Welt Online. As far as I know it completely bypassed the English-speaking world. Not even the hardest of the hardcore Ballardians that have crossed my path have referenced this (I only found it through my site stats, [...]

‘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 (in)famous [...]

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 private [...]