Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Samuel L. Jackson is back in the game, soon to work with the best material he’ll ever clap eyes on.

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.

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

Reminder: six days left to submit your entry for the Ballardian Home Movie Competition. Here is some extra background…

A few notes on Steve Severin, the Banshees, and Ballard…

I caved in and implemented two site-specific scenarios that I possibly thought I wouldn’t do in any especially near version of the future…

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.

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 houses […]

Damien Love interviewed J.G. Ballard in September 1996. At the time Ballard was one of only a very few people in the UK to have seen David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash, which was wrapped in a controversy that was baffling then and seems truly mystifying now.

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 off, […]

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 in particular […]

From Geoff Coupe:
A news story with Ballardian overtones … members of India’s professional class protesting over the fact that the dust, heat and squalor of India is seeping into their gated communities. Some typically Ballardian motifs are on display: the empty swimming pool, residents taking militant action; life is imitating art. Some unconscious irony as […]

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 […]

+ IDEAL, RADIANT
In his excellent paper, ‘Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse’, delivered at the Ballard conference, Owen Hatherley locates JGB’s Vermilion Sands stories as a vision at right angles to the dystopian tradition in which Ballard is normally housed — the Vermilion collection posits, Hatherley writes, ‘an actual, liveable future utopia that is eminently possible’. And yet, […]

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. Especially […]

Brunswick St, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia. Photo: Simon Sellars.
All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of their […]

As I’ve been taken to task regarding my last post about the J.G. Ballard Myspace profile, in hindsight I can see that my tongue had actually pierced my cheek, and for that I apologise. Just to clarify, my post was chiefly to comment on Myspace as an entity; my rant against ‘a terrible evil gated […]

J.G. Ballard has often said he doesn’t use the internet. So what’s he doing with his own myspace page?
It’s another fake celebrity myspace entity, although I see that in the comments someone has already invited ‘Ballard’ to do a reading.
With all due respect to the people who erected this (and thanks for the link, by […]

OPENING LINE:
“25 August, 1988. Where to start?”
This novella is just 87 pages long. Ballard calls it a ‘whydunit’ (rather than a ‘whodunit’), and it’s as uncanny as that implies. The shadow of Columbine hangs over this work (or, rather, vice versa).
The murders happened shortly after 8 o’clock on the morning of 25 June, 1988. Media […]

Photo by Simon Sellars
This transcript was first published in Sub Dee Magazine (no. 5 Summer 1997), a print project I was involved in long before Ballardian. At the time, J.G. Ballard’s career was in the ascendancy after what was perceived to be an average period in his writing. Cocaine Nights had just been released and […]