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Archive for the ‘features’ Category

“Paradigm of nowhere”: Shepperton, a photo essay (part 1)

By Simon Sellars • Apr 26th, 2008 •

Category: Australia, Lead Story, Shepperton, alternate worlds, dystopia, features, flying, sexual politics, suburbia, surrealism, utopia

In 2007 I toured Shepperton using Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company as my guidebook. Here are the results of that neurological survey, born from the torsion of “every cell in my body waiting at the end of a miniature runway”.



1971: Year of the Drake

By Simon Sellars • Apr 19th, 2008 •

Category: David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Lead Story, YouTube, fashion, features, film, science fiction

Here’s a tribute to Gabrielle Drake, a co-conspirator of Ballard’s and the undisputed Queen of both outer and inner space. All hail 1971, the Year of the Drake.



‘The Crashman’: An Experiment in Applied Internet Ballardianism

By Crashman • Apr 8th, 2008 •

Category: David Cronenberg, Freud, Lead Story, Michael Moorcock, WWII, YouTube, censorship, death of affect, features, film, flying, humour, media landscape, music, psychopathology, speed & violence, sport, war

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.



Ballardian Home Movies: The Final Cut

By Simon Sellars • Mar 2nd, 2008 •

Category: YouTube, dystopia, entropy, features, film, gated communities, humour, psychopathology, speed & violence, suburbia, suicide, surveillance, technology, television, urban decay

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



Miracles of Life extract & interview

By Simon Sellars • Jan 20th, 2008 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Lead Story, Shanghai, WWII, autobiography, features

The Times is featuring an extract from Ballard’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life. There’s also an accompanying interview, in which it’s revealed that Ballard has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer.



J.G. Ballard & Architectures of Control

By Dan Lockton • Jan 3rd, 2008 •

Category: Lead Story, architecture, censorship, dystopia, fascism, features, psychology, speed & violence

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.



J.G. Ballard: The Visual Tribute

By Simon Sellars • Dec 28th, 2007 •

Category: Australia, David Cronenberg, Lead Story, entropy, enviro-disaster, features, short stories, visual art

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



Sam Scoggins: ‘Unlimited Dream Company’ Film

By Simon Sellars • Dec 22nd, 2007 •

Category: Lead Story, Shepperton, features, film, filmography, science fiction, surrealism

Sam Scoggins has finally digitised his ‘lost’ 1983 quasi-doco on Ballard, loosely structured around themes found in The Unlimited Dream Company. There are plans for ballardian.com to interview Sam, but for now, enjoy the film.



“A fierce and wayward beauty”: Waste in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, Parts I & II

By William Viney • Dec 11th, 2007 •

Category: Lead Story, alternate worlds, architecture, dystopia, entropy, enviro-disaster, features, speed & violence, urban decay

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.



An Archaeological Find

By Simon Sellars • Dec 4th, 2007 •

Category: Futurists, architecture, consumerism, death of affect, features, 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.



Grave New World: Introduction, Part 2

By Dominika Oramus • Nov 13th, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Salvador Dali, Shanghai, Steven Spielberg, WWII, William Burroughs, academia, features, science fiction, surrealism

by Dominika Oramus

World’s first hydrogen bomb explosion, Eniwetok Atoll, 1952.

Dominika Oramus teaches Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. The following is Part Two of the introduction to Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, her post-doctoral thesis. Grave New World currently exists as a (very) limited […]



Grave New World: Introduction, Part 1

By Dominika Oramus • Nov 5th, 2007 •

Category: David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Jean Baudrillard, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Salvador Dali, WWII, William Burroughs, academia, death of affect, dystopia, features, psychiatry, science fiction, surrealism, technology, urban ruins

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.



Melborea Moronica: New ‘Depraved Species of Electric Flora’ Found Growing in Melbourne, Australia

By Simon Sellars • Oct 19th, 2007 •

Category: Australia, Ballardosphere, Jean Baudrillard, YouTube, celebrity culture, consumerism, crime, death of affect, dystopia, fascism, features, film, media landscape, politics, speed & violence, sport, suburbia, urban revolt

A Melbourne rugby reporter, Ben Davis, is bashed on live TV while giving a report. Unsurprisingly, his attackers are caught, given the attack was broadcast to the entire nation. Ballardian? Absolutely. Let’s count the ways…



Jeff Bartlett: Man for Our Times

By Simon Sellars • Oct 9th, 2007 •

Category: David Cronenberg, body horror, 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 […]



Dream’s Ransom: Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun

By Pedro Groppo • Sep 14th, 2007 •

Category: David Cronenberg, Shanghai, Steven Spielberg, WWII, YouTube, autobiography, features, film, filmography, flying

Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun (more at YouTube.)

by Pedro Groppo

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard
Starring: Christian Bale, John Malkovich

Whereas the sensibilities of J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg, who directed Crash (1996), seem to overlap and complement each other, one would be hard-pressed […]



Shanghai Jim: Form Dictated by Time

By Pippa Tandy • Aug 27th, 2007 •

Category: Shanghai, Steven Spielberg, WWII, deep time, features, film, filmography

ABOVE: Youtube uplink for Shanghai Jim (BBC Bookmark, 1991; produced by James Runcie).

by Pippa Tandy

SHANGHAI JIM (1991)
Director/Producer: James Runcie
Executive Producer: Nigel Williams
Starring: J.G. Ballard, Michael Troughton, Hans Gebruers

See here for a transcript of J.G. Ballard’s commentary from the film.

DOCUMENTARY FILMS about the lives and works of artists have many different functions. They may describe their […]



Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon

By Simon Sellars • Aug 10th, 2007 •

Category: Chris Petit, David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, architecture, death of affect, features, film, filmography, posthumanism, psychogeography, speed & violence

&

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 of depth is missing from the room, and […]



J.G. Ballard’s Experiment in Chemical Living

By Mike B • Aug 1st, 2007 •

Category: Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shepperton, William Burroughs, advertising, features, invisible literature

by Mike Bonsall

J.G. Ballard in 1960. In the background is a poster of his ‘Project for a new novel’, made two years earlier.
Chemistry & Industry … was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it […]



A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company

By Mike Holliday • Jul 17th, 2007 •

Category: Shepperton, fascism, features, flying

Cover detail: The Unlimited Dream Company (Cape 1979; artwork by Bill Botten).

Mike Holliday explains how to read J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel The Unlimited Dream Company as a fascistic work.

Ambiguity is one of the defining features of J.G. Ballard’s fiction. Consider, for example:
+ Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women – to what extent […]



Thirteen to Centaurus

By Simon Sellars • Jun 24th, 2007 •

Category: Philip K. Dick, alternate worlds, features, film, filmography, inner space, science fiction, short stories, space relics

‘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 […]



The Rats that Ate Mill Park

By Simon Sellars • Mar 27th, 2007 •

Category: Australia, Jean Baudrillard, boredom, dystopia, fascism, features, speed & violence, suburbia, urban revolt

by Simon Sellars

Suburban Badlands: the Mill Park aftermath. Photo: Angela Wylie (from the Age newspaper).
The system is self-regulating. It relies on our sense of civic responsibility. Without that, society would collapse. In fact, the collapse may even have begun.”
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J.G. Ballard. Millennium People (2003; p. 104).
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On the morning of 2 January 2007, Melbourne woke to disturbing […]



Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard

By Benjamin Noys • Mar 21st, 2007 •

Category: Jean Baudrillard, academia, consumerism, crime, features, invisible literature, media landscape, visual art

i.m. Jean Baudrillard
by Benjamin Noys
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In the wake of Jean Baudrillard’s death, Ballardian presents Benjamin Noys’s essay exploring the ‘point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J.G. Ballard’. This is a slightly modified version of the article that appeared as ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’, Ícone 9 (2006): 29-38, reproduced […]



Collapsing Bulkheads: the Covers of Crash

By Rick Poynor • Mar 12th, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, William Burroughs, advertising, fashion, features, visual art

by Rick Poynor

‘Missing the point’: (detail, Livre de Poche edition, 1973; design: Atelier Pascal Vercken).

NOTE: This is an edited version of an essay published in Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture by Rick Poynor, Laurence King Publishing, 2006. First published in Eye no. 52, Summer 2004. Reproduced with permission.

J. G. BALLARD’S Crash tests the […]



Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency

By k-punk • Sep 25th, 2006 •

Category: Jean Baudrillard, William Burroughs, fashion, features, sexual politics, terrorism

‘Obscene mannequins’. ‘Conceptual deaths’. The eroticisation of violence in the media landscape… the stunning ‘State of Emergency’ spread in the current Vogue Italia seems to come straight out of JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition…
Welcome to our first guest post, hopefully the beginnings of a regular series in which we invite bloggers from far and wide […]



Critical Mass: Sound, Story and Music in David Cronenberg’s Crash

By Cat Hope • Jun 29th, 2006 •

Category: Australia, Brian Eno, David Cronenberg, audio, features, film

As part of our Ballardian Music series, Cat Hope looks back at Howard Shore’s soundtrack for the David Cronenberg adaptation of Crash.

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Cat Hope is an Australian musician and academic, based in Perth, Western Australia. Besides performing in the bands Lux Mammmoth and Gata Negra, she also performs solo noise music using bass guitar. Cat lectures […]



Can We Ever Escape This Death Drive?

By Andrés 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 […]



My Dream of Flying to Tinian Island

By Simon Sellars • May 30th, 2006 •

Category: Ballardosphere, WWII, consumerism, features, sexual politics, suicide

Military church, Tinian, © Dan Norton 2006
Thanks to Iain X from the JGB Mailing List for this link, a series of photos taken by a ’seabee’ stationed on the North Pacific, Micronesian island of Tinian during WWII. As the site’s author, Dan Norton, says, “These photos were developed by my grandfather in his clandestine […]



Heathrow Hilton

By timc • Oct 7th, 2005 •

Category: architecture, features, photography

Photos from a recent sojourn (en route to Singapore and Bali) at Ballard’s favourite location, the Heathrow Hilton. “The Heathrow Hilton, designed by Michael Manser, is a masterpiece. It is my favourite building in London, and keeps alive the spirit of the 20th century’s greatest architect, Le Corbusier. Beautifully proportioned, it resembles a cross between […]



The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media

By Pippa Tandy • Oct 7th, 2005 •

Category: Australia, academia, features, media landscape

by Pippa Tandy

“In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality – the reality we inhabit – almost as if it were a cadaver, or let’s say, the contents of a special kind of forensic inquisition… I regard all these as data which will play their role in whatever hypothesis […]



Why I love/hate CSI

By Andrés Vaccari • Aug 30th, 2005 •

Category: Australia, Ballardosphere, features, psychology, television, terrorism

Recently I’ve come across a piece by one of my favorite authors, J. G. Ballard, on a show I’ve become addicted to against my better judgement: Crime Scene Investigation (you can access Ballard’s article here). I was pleased and disappointed by Ballard’s analysis. Although a lot of his comments are perceptive, I think he missed […]