Archive for the ‘death of affect’ Category
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 8th, 2010 •
Category:
alternate worlds, biology, body horror, boredom, CCTV, celebrity culture, conspiracy theory, consumerism, cyberpunk, death of affect, entropy, Hawkwind, inner space, Lead Story, psychopathology, reviews, surrealism, surveillance, technology
A review-essay of Jeremy Reed’s latest collection of poetry, West End Survival Kit. The review also discusses the long and enigmatic relationship Reed has with Ballard, who wrote the foreword to the collection, where he paid tribute to Reed’s ‘extraterrestrial talent’.
By
Nicholas Cobb •
Jan 18th, 2010 •
Category:
alternate worlds, architecture, CCTV, death of affect, dystopia, features, gated communities, Jean Baudrillard, Lead Story, leisure, non-place, photography, psychopathology, surveillance, technology, theme parks
Nicholas Cobb’s architectural model of a corporate campus, photographed with a malevolent, dystopian flair, and exploring parallel themes to Ballard’s Super-Cannes.
By
Brian Baker •
Jul 23rd, 2009 •
Category:
academia, alternate worlds, America, architecture, death of affect, deep time, features, film, inner space, invisible literature, Lead Story, memory, New Worlds, pastiche, perception, Shanghai, short stories, time travel, WWII
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.
By
Brian Baker •
Jul 23rd, 2009 •
Category:
academia, alternate worlds, America, architecture, death of affect, deep time, film, inner space, invisible literature, memory, New Worlds, pastiche, perception, Shanghai, short stories, temporality, time travel, WWII
‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’ by Brian Baker ..:: CONTINUED from >> Part 1 ::… ♣♠♥♦ 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. ♣♠♥♦ Hearts ♥ [...]
By
Mike Holliday •
Jun 20th, 2009 •
Category:
crime, death of affect, fascism, features, horror, Lead Story
Mike Holliday gets to the bottom of the 1968 obscenity trial brought against Bill Butler and the Unicorn Bookshop, for stocking Ballard’s ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’. As prosecuting counsel Michael Worsley asked of Ballard’s work, “Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?”
By
Simon Sellars Melb Psy •
May 27th, 2009 •
Category:
advertising, alternate worlds, architecture, audio, Australia, boredom, CCTV, consumerism, death of affect, deep time, fascism, features, hyperreality, Lead Story, leisure, micronations, occult, perception, photography, psychogeography, schizophrenia, surveillance, temporality, time travel, utopia
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Nov 18th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, censorship, death of affect, fashion, Italy, photography, sexual politics, Steven Meisel
Steven Meisel: rejected by Vogue Italia, embraced by ballardian.com.
By
Simon Sellars •
Aug 5th, 2008 •
Category:
alternate worlds, America, Ballardosphere, body horror, consumerism, death of affect, film, gated communities, horror, humour, micronations, urban revolt
Parallels between Ballard’s Kingdom Come and Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.
By
Simon Sellars •
Apr 18th, 2008 •
Category:
alternate worlds, Ballardosphere, boredom, CCTV, consumerism, death of affect, inner space, surveillance, television, YouTube
A man is trapped in an elevator for 41 hours, steadily losing his mind. But to you, he’s just another bug crawling around on a security-camera lens. What do you do?
By
Crashman •
Apr 8th, 2008 •
Category:
censorship, David Cronenberg, death of affect, features, film, flying, Freud, humour, Lead Story, media landscape, Michael Moorcock, music, psychopathology, speed & violence, sport, war, WWII, YouTube
Drawing inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars in 1970, the Crashman presents his own festival of Atrocity films: aviation disasters set to musical soundtracks.
By
Simon Sellars •
Mar 14th, 2008 •
Category:
alternate worlds, CCTV, crime, death of affect, features, gated communities, suburbia, surveillance, technology
To celebrate the new version of the wonderful SurveillanceSaver software, here is The Ballardian Primer to Surveillance Cameras, with all quotes taken from Ballard and all images lifted from the Axis CCTV network.
By
Simon Sellars •
Jan 15th, 2008 •
Category:
advertising, Ballardosphere, body horror, consumerism, death of affect, fashion, visual art
Here’s a new campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. But it doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling? Note the photographer: none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel.
By
Simon Sellars •
Dec 14th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, body horror, celebrity culture, censorship, David Cronenberg, death of affect, film, sexual politics, speed & violence
How strange is this: Rosanna Arquette, and Crash, popping up in all sorts of places. This film, Ballard’s story, still packs a powerful psychological enema.
By
Simon Sellars •
Dec 4th, 2007 •
Category:
architecture, consumerism, death of affect, features, Fredric Jameson, Futurists, media landscape, science fiction, speed & violence, technology
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.
By
Dominika Oramus •
Nov 5th, 2007 •
Category:
academia, David Cronenberg, death of affect, dystopia, features, Iain Sinclair, Jean Baudrillard, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, psychiatry, Salvador Dali, science fiction, surrealism, technology, urban ruins, William Burroughs, WWII
Dominika Oramus reads Ballard’s work as a record of the gradual internal degeneration of Western civilization: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West.
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 9th, 2007 •
Category:
body horror, David Cronenberg, death of affect, features, film, speed & violence
Some people get their kicks from braving a mob of blood-crazed shoppers to attack the nearest mannequin. But if that doesn’t appeal, why not exact virtual revenge? Keith emails to inform of one of the very best things online: a little feature over at ConsumerReports.org called the ‘Crash Test Selector’. It’s a series of films [...]
By
Rick McGrath •
Aug 20th, 2007 •
Category:
academia, death of affect, dystopia, entropy, Jean Baudrillard, reviews, urban decay
The basic tenet in Dominika Oramus’ new book on Ballard is that since the end of World War II western civilization has been merrily racing down the Highway to Hell in a white Pontiac; and all the evidence you need is in the fiction of J.G. Ballard.
By
Simon Sellars •
Aug 10th, 2007 •
Category:
architecture, Chris Petit, David Cronenberg, death of affect, features, film, filmography, Iain Sinclair, Philip K. Dick, posthumanism, psychogeography, speed & violence, William Burroughs
ABOVE: Crash! on YouTube by Simon Sellars CRASH! (1971) Director: Harley Cokliss Writer: J.G. Ballard Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake I wasn’t satisfied by just writing SF stories, you see. My imagination was eager to expand in all directions.” J.G. Ballard. ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, 1982. Leached away by the camera lens, the dimension [...]
By
Ballardian •
Aug 10th, 2007 •
Category:
architecture, death of affect, features, film, filmography, posthumanism, psychogeography, speed & violence
ABOVE: Cokliss/Ballard on YouTube CRASH! Director: Harley Cokliss Writer: J.G. Ballard Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake This a transcript of the meta-narration and voiceover from the film CRASH!. See here for ‘Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon’, an appraisal of the film. NARRATOR: In slow motion, the test cars moved towards each other on collision courses, unwinding [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jun 28th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, body horror, celebrity culture, death of affect, film, media landscape, short stories, urban revolt
While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Apr 24th, 2007 •
Category:
death of affect, film, invisible literature, media landscape, short stories, television
This is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately): For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Mar 7th, 2007 •
Category:
academia, Ballardosphere, Borges, death of affect, Jean Baudrillard, speed & violence
According to French Education Minister Gilles de Robien: “We lose a great creator. Jean Baudrillard was one of the great figures of French sociological thought.” In the wake of Baudrillard’s death at age 77, with homeostatic news sources struggling to redefine hyperreality while churning out great steaming wads of the stuff, return to Baudrillard’s glistening, [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 17th, 2006 •
Category:
bibliography, death of affect, Jean Baudrillard, sexual politics, speed & violence
OPENING LINE: “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.” If The Drowned World was the book which cemented Ballard’s literary reputation (in Britain, at least), then Crash was almost certainly the one which made him a non-entity in America’s eyes. Following on from publisher Nelson Doubleday’s outrage at an earlier Ballard story, ‘Why I Want [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 5th, 2006 •
Category:
advertising, architecture, bibliography, boredom, celebrity culture, consumerism, death of affect, deep time, dystopia, enviro-disaster, fashion, film, flying, humour, invisible literature, media landscape, medical procedure, non-fiction, photography, politics, psychogeography, psychology, Salvador Dali, science fiction, sexual politics, space relics, speed & violence, surrealism, television, urban decay, visual art, William Burroughs, WWII
OPENING LINE: “In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’). From the 1996 Harper Collins edition: The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, [...]
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 1st, 2006 •
Category:
advertising, architecture, bibliography, boredom, celebrity culture, consumerism, death of affect, deep time, dystopia, enviro-disaster, flying, humour, invisible literature, media landscape, medical procedure, New Worlds, photography, politics, psychogeography, psychology, science fiction, sexual politics, Shepperton, short stories, space relics, speed & violence, suicide, surrealism, television, terrorism, urban decay, urban revolt, visual art, WWII
OPENING LINE: “I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’). From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally [...]
By
Andres Vaccari •
Jun 28th, 2006 •
Category:
architecture, death of affect, entropy, features, media landscape, politics, terrorism
One of the sources for the death of affect is the distancing from community and a sense of shared existence brought about by the technological management of reality. There is a central paradox here: while the technical construction of collective time (through the engineered events in the media) tends to produce an instant ‘real-time’ that [...]
By
Ben Austwick •
Oct 1st, 2005 •
Category:
boredom, consumerism, death of affect, photography, urban revolt
A series of Photos from the scene of February 2005′s riots.