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Archive for the ‘Germany’ Category

‘Violence without end’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard

By Dan OHara • Jun 24th, 2008 •

Category: America, Germany, archival, boredom, enviro-disaster, inner space, politics, psychopathology, religion, science fiction, speed & violence, the middle classes, war

This is the latest in Dan O’Hara’s back translations of German Ballard chats: an interview with JGB from 2005. This may well be the only time Ballard has been asked to consider the lyrics of Kanye West.



‘I really would not want to fuck George W. Bush!’: A Conversation with J.G. Ballard

By Dan OHara • May 17th, 2008 •

Category: America, Bruce Sterling, Germany, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, WWII, William Gibson, archival, consumerism, politics, psychology, science fiction, short stories, surrealism

Dan O’Hara is back with another translation of a German Ballard interview, this time from 2007 with JGB in priapic, puckish form.



‘Der Visionär des Phantastischen’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard

By Dan OHara • May 4th, 2008 •

Category: Germany, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, archival, drugs, media landscape, politics, punk, science fiction, sexual politics, space relics, speed & violence, surrealism, technology, urban revolt

Another installment in Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of archival German Ballard interviews: a 1982 conversation conducted by Werner Fuchs and Joachim Körber.



‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld

By Dan OHara • Mar 23rd, 2008 •

Category: Freud, Germany, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shanghai, William Burroughs, archival, dystopia, film, psychology, science fiction, sexual politics, short stories, surrealism, utopia

This is the second of Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of JGB interviews originally published in German. This one dates from 1976, and in it Ballard provides comment on Russian writers and explains how film technique infiltrates and influences his own writing.



Munich Round-Up: Interview with J.G. Ballard

By Dan OHara • Mar 15th, 2008 •

Category: Germany, WWII, archival, biology, deep time, entropy, enviro-disaster, inner space, science fiction, surrealism

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.



‘You are Hochhaus!’: Ballard in Berlin

By Dan OHara • Jan 9th, 2008 •

Category: Chris Marker, David Cronenberg, Germany, Steven Spielberg, WWII, architecture, dystopia, entropy, fascism, film, gated communities, interviews, urban decay, urban revolt, urban ruins, utopia

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.



'Seeing everything makes you sad'

By Alexander Gutzmer • Dec 7th, 2007 •

Category: Germany, architecture, archival, consumerism, politics, terrorism

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.



'Who sees everything, becomes sad'

By Simon Sellars • Dec 2nd, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Germany, architecture, psychogeography

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, [...]



Der Golem

By Simon Sellars • Oct 26th, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Germany, body horror, posthumanism, speed & violence, technology

John Carter Wood sent me this link to vintage German crash-test photos. These shots evoke the footage in the Crash! short film, where Ballard notes, ‘I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. … They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested [...]