Ballardian

Ballardian.com presents selections taken from artist Simon O’Carrigan’s mixed-media series “The Drowned World”, a title taken in reference to a speculative fiction that inspired much of the imagery in this work: J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.

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’.

Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of quarries, factories, mining pits and railcuts are extraordinary for their depiction of mankind’s organisation of the land for resource-extraction and profit. Paul Roth makes the case that Burtynsky is one of our most Ballardian artists. Adopting a style in overt homage to Ballard, the essay honours his legacy as the foremost imaginative interpreter of the world Burtynsky documents.

A slew of information on Ann Lislegaard, the brilliant artist behind ‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard’, the mesmerising animation that showed at the recent JGB exhibition in Barcelona. Includes links to an interview, video excerpts and stills.

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

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

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

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.

Dan O’Hara has re-translated three interviews with JGB, originally published in German in the 60s, in which Ballard provides absorbing insight into his enviro-disaster trilogy: The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World.

Here are the entries in the 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. Congratulations to the winner, Ben Slater.

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.

Here’s a selection of visual art that we’ve previously featured on this site, all directly inspired by or referencing themes in Ballard’s work. See Part 1 for more recent discoveries.

Image from ‘Future Ruins’
by Michelle Lord

Inspired by author J.G. Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the [...]

Here’s a selection of visual art I’ve recently come across, all directly inspired by or referencing themes in Ballard’s work.

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.

Cousin Silas has created two albums inspired by the works of J.G. Ballard. Simon Sellars spoke to Silas about Ballard, Lovecraft, Forteana, Moorcock, Eno, Tarkovsky — all the essentials.

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.

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 *
* * [...]

Interview by Simon Sellars.
Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognisable music critics around — or at least his style is, not least for its willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of sustained intellectual discourse rather than as a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unbridled [...]

Egyptian Ballard World: dead monorails hanging against the sky like guillotines (photo by Dubai Dave).
Dickens World is set to open next week, according to this report. It’s a recreation of ‘a dark, dirty and dank London…populated by thieves, murderers and ghosts…[with an] air of authenticity as it was built in consultation with experts from the [...]

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 [...]