The inspiration behind this body of work came from a growing curiosity about recent corporate developments of private space in London that apparently encourage the public to access them. Typically these environments have beautiful landscaping around a canal or lake. An amphitheatre seems to be a further prerequisite as is CCTV which monitors everything including security guards who amble around these empty places. The hustle and bustle of neighboring streets feels a world away.

In the summer of 2008 I went for a series of walks along arterial routes heading out of London. That summer I had read several of J.G. Ballard’s novels including Super Cannes, which is about disturbing behaviour amongst the inhabitants of a gated community isolated from the world. On one of these ambles I chanced upon a recently completed building development. I felt compelled to enter this beautifully landscaped glass and steel environment. It appeared as if no expense had been spared. What I encountered there helped to crystallize some vague ideas that became the photographs that are presented in this collection. The idyllic setting combined with the ever-present ’security’ got under my skin and left me wondering about a dystopian outcome for this kind of world.

I remember sitting down by the artificial lake. The sun was beating down and people casually wandered about. I gazed up at the office blocks. I thought it must be an idyllic place to work. London felt far away. I imagined that you could lift these acres up and deposit them in any city in the world and they would feel at home. This was an anti-Dickensian space, more an abstract one. It was a statement of how the world of work could be. The management ethos, proclaimed on various signs, was ‘enjoy.work’.

Enjoy.work. Arbeit macht frei. Freedom through work. I rose to the bait. Unease crept into my thoughts.

I found myself searching for the cracks. A variety of methods had been used to try to block the sun reaching the interior spaces. It appeared as if, as each building had been erected, ever more elaborate ways had been devised to keep nature out. What was it really like to work in there?

I noticed that an algae bloom threatened the lake’s plant and animal life. Peering into one building’s reception area, I saw how the appearance of leisure had been carefully arranged. Bicycles, guitars and deckchairs in neat rows. An abandoned chess game and open magazines on the coffee table. A half-finished painting-by-numbers canvas on an easel. No one about. Why had everyone had to leave so suddenly? Or, were they trying to hide something? Soon after, I was asked to leave for taking photographs without permission.

After some months I built an architectural model inspired by this corporate campus, and began photographing. I wanted a dystopian world, centred on a dark lake, that seemed to have the opposite effect on those that gazed into it than that intended by the landscape architect. So, some of the ant-like figures turn up to work, use the facilities and leave. Others seem to be employed in extracurricular activities of a more malevolent nature.

Nicholas Cobb, 2009.

The Office Park book, featuring many more images, is available at blurb as well as a number of other books by Nicholas Cobb.

Lured by tax concessions and a climate like northern California’s, dozens of multinational companies had moved into the business park that now employed over ten thousand people. The senior managements were the most highly paid professional caste in Europe, a new elite of administrators, énarques and scientific entrepreneurs. The lavish brochure enthused over a vision of glass and titanium straight from the drawing boards of Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry, but softened by landscaped parks and artificial lakes, a humane version of Corbusier’s radiant city. Even my sceptical eye was prepared to blink.

J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes (2000).

The advertising displays in the estate office overlooking the roundabout on the RN7 had the look of museum tableaux, and the artist’s impression of a concourse as crowded as the Champs-Elysées, lined with boutiques and thronged by high-spending customers, seemed to describe a forgotten twentieth-century world. Only the cyber-cafe next door was serving any customers. The computer terminals facing the bar were out of use, but three bikers in metallized boots and Mad Max leathers sat at the outdoor tables. They formed a feral presence in the hyper-modern complex, like carrion-birds on a skyscraper cornice, filling an unplanned niche in the ecology of the future.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

An almost drugged air floated across the lake, a rogue cloud that had drifted down the hillside, carrying the scent of office-freshener from a factory in Grasse. I walked along the water’s edge, attracting the attention of two security men in a Range Rover parked among the pines. One watched me through his binoculars, no doubt puzzled that anyone in Eden-Olympia should have the leisure to stroll through the midday sun.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

As if to encourage the fantasies of the stranger sitting nearby, she kicked off her high-heeled shoes and hitched up her skirt to scratch her stockinged insteps, exposing a satisfying glimpse of white thigh. Despite the smart suit, her blonde hair was a little too blown, giving her the look of a nervy and intellectual tart. Was she a call-girl, computerized like everyone else at Eden-Olympia?

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

A black Range Rover clumsily straddled a flowerbed, its tyres flattening the rose bushes. Isolated figures patrolled the lawns, like shadows free to play among themselves for a few hours each night. Behind the shrubbery sounded the low-pitched murmur of radio traffic, a soft anatomy of the night.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Halder stood with his back to me, searching the upstairs windows, and I could see his reflection in the glass doors of the sun lounge. He was smiling to himself, a strain of deviousness that was almost likeable. Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Crowds strolled under the palms, enjoying the warm autumn day, like citizens of another world who had come ashore for a few hours. Wilder Penrose had been right to say that there was something unreal about them.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Were assassins aware of the contingent world? I tried to imagine Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the book depository in Dealey Plaza on the morning he shot Kennedy. Did he notice a line of overnight washing in his neighbour’s yard, a fresh dent in the nextdoor Buick, a newspaper boy with a bandaged knee? The contingent world must have pressed against his temples, clamouring to be let in. But Oswald had kept the shutters bolted against the storm, opening them for a few seconds as the President’s Lincoln moved across the lens of the Zapruder camera and on into history.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Prostitutes came out at dusk, usherettes in the theatre of the night, shining their miniature torches at any kerb that threatened their high-heels. Two of them entered the Rialto and sat at the next table, muscular brunettes with the hips and thighs of professional athletes. They ordered drinks they never touched, killing time before they set off to trawl the hotels.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘There’s a remarkable need for punitive violence hidden away in the senior executive mind.’
‘And sex tends to release it?’
‘It’s meant to, for sound biological reasons. Sex is such a quick route to the psychopathic, the shortest of short cuts to the perverse. We aren’t running an adventure playground, but a forcing house designed to expand the psychopathic possibilities of the executive imagination. It needs to be carefully monitored. Sadomasochism, excretory sex-play, body-piercing and wife-pandering can easily veer off into something nasty.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The glass and gun-metal office blocks were set well apart from each other, separated by artificial lakes and forested traffic islands where a latter-day Crusoe could have found comfortable refuge. The faint mist over the lakes and the warm sun reflected from the glass curtain-walling seemed to generate an opal haze, as if the entire business park were a mirage, a virtual city conjured into the pine-scented air like a son-et-lumière vision of a new Versailles.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste for cruelty and an intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he’s trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate this planet.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

I needed to escape from Eden-Olympia, with its ceaseless work and its ethic of corporate responsibility. The business park was the outpost of an advanced kind of puritanism, and a virtually sex-free zone. Jane and I rarely made love. The flair she had shown during my days as a virtual cripple had been smothered by a sleep of eye-masks and sedatives, followed by cold showers and snatched breakfasts.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Who are the tenants? Big international companies?’
‘The biggest. Mitsui, Siemens, Unilever, Sumitomo, plus all the French giants – Elf Aquitaine, Carrefour, Rhone-Poulenc. Along with a host of smaller firms: investment brokers, bioengineering outfits, design consultancies. I sound like a salesman, but when you get to know it you’ll see what a remarkable place Eden-Olympia really is. In its way this is a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Between the security building and the Elf-Maritime research labs was an open-air cafeteria, a facility intended to soften the public face of the business park and give it a passing resemblance to an Alpine resort. Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The future was a second Eden-Olympia, almost twice the size of the original, the same mix of multinational companies, research laboratories and financial consultancies. Hyundai, BP Amoco, Motorola and Unilever had secured their plots, investing in long-term leases that virtually financed the whole project. The site-contractors were already at work, clearing the holm oaks and umbrella pines that had endured since Roman times, surviving forest fires and military invasions. Nature, as the new millennium dictated, was giving way for the last time to the tax shelter and the corporate car park.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Work and the realities of corporate life anchored Eden-Olympia to the ground. The buildings wore their ventilation shafts and cable conduits on their external walls, an open reminder of Eden-Olympia’s dedication to company profits and the approval of its shareholders. The satellite dishes on the roofs resembled the wimples of an order of computer-literate nuns, committed to the sanctity of the workstation and the pieties of the spreadsheet.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

High above me, fluted columns carried the pitched roofs, an attempt at a vernacular architecture that failed to disguise this executive-class prison. Taking their cue from Eden-Olympia and Antibes-les-Pins, the totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

I stepped from the car-park lift onto the overheated roof, a cockpit of sun and death. In the mirror curtain-walling of the office building I could see myself reflected like an unwary tourist who had strayed through the wrong door into the danger-filled silences of a bullring.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘We ought to move on. Ghosts are walking around Eden-Olympia…’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The Office Park book, featuring many more images, is available at blurb as well as a number of other books by Nicholas Cobb.

..:: MORE INFORMATION:
+ Interview with Nicholas Cobb about The Office Park.
+ Nicholas Cobb’s website.

Soundwalk by MELANIE CHILIANIS; photography by Simon Sellars.

“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.”

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006).

We took a recent jaunt to Melbourne’s Crown Casino, prime Ballardian space, in order to map the coordinates of this micronational zone, this city state — consumer-driven control space. We took photos on a Nokia 6288 — photography disguised as furtive texting — while Mel Chil performed a secret sound walk. Her head bowed and her eyes averted (for soundwalkers must not allow the other senses to interfere with the keen art of listening), she strode silently behind us through the Zone, her super-powered, omidirectional microphone and optimal recording unit stuffed into her bag to note the results.

Her sound file* is below — play it loud while reading for maximum effect, for clearly the audiospatial disorientation engendered by Casino space plays a critical role in maintaining the illusion of languid disconnectedness.

* Note: you won’t see the audio player in Google Reader.

Crown Casino increases people’s perception of frequency of winning not only by having big visual displays and advertisements but also by having announcements over a loudspeaker of a poker machine jackpot winner. If every gambler who has lost everything is announced over the loudspeaker in the same way, problem gambling would be greatly reduced. Moreover, the promotion of the illusion of winning is also built into a poker machine in which a winning pay out is made with a loud noise as coins come crashing into the metal pay out tray to remind nearby players that winning is a real possibility.

Public Gambling Enquiry, Australian Vietnamese Women’s Welfare Association.

It’s a unique phenomenon… [a] metropolis … utterly devoted to leisure, something close to suspended animation. And it’s very inviting. But people lying on their backs are very vulnerable to predators.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

The signage declares, ‘We’re creating a new world at Crown’, a come-on none can resist. But even before entering the Casino, we were aware that we were no longer in the world of quotidian politeness. The first task was to pass through the borderzone, out on the concrete apron surrounding the complex, where brutal expediency in combat with pornographic greed meant that even bag ladies had to secure their shopping trolleys if left unattended.

But this isn’t reality, it’s not even a dream. It’s sort of a halfway house between the two.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

Opposite the Crown Entertainment Complex, bordering the west side, is the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. Its constructivist lines slice the sky like an obsolete, forward-thinking city of the immediate retro-future to come, a take-off ramp into the ozone that seems to suggest the only way out is through an ascent to heaven, or … this way, down, deep into the east, into Crown — into half-life.

He stared at the silent aisles, working out his challenge to this eventless world. We left the liquor store and paused by a Thai restaurant, whose empty tables receded through a shadow world of flock wallpaper and gilded elephants. Next to it was an untenanted retail unit, a concrete vault like an abandoned segment of space-time.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights, 1996.

We enter, ‘wearing the Crown‘, instantly absorbed by the otherworldliness of the Casino. The effect is total — there are no clocks anywhere to be seen, creating a timeless zone in which the breakdown of the biological clock (the legend of old ladies urinating at poker tables, rather than missing a hand, for example) is the only indication of chronometry. Perhaps the only remaining link to temporality is the schedule of the televised horse racing. A horse — horses? — seem to haunt the interior…

There is no natural light of any kind, no windows. Mirrors take up entire walls, distending the innards of the place into infinity. The long walk between the mid-section of poker machines and blackjack tables seems to never end. Hovering alien ectoplasm, the sickly UV of Giger-style nightmares, falls into view. Magic mushrooms hang from the ceiling, glowing lysergically. We are in a bunker, are we in a bunker? Miles below the Earth’s surface, below the Earth’s surface? Drinking, gambling and watching spooling sports. Palms itchy.

The first shrines had begun to appear, wayside altars for passing shoppers, places of pause and reflection for those making endless journeys within the universe of the dome.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Hanging from the ceiling, a plaster-cast altar of motorcycle fascism, its strident coat of arms larger than the machine itself. Lest the devotees become too overwhelmed and seize the handlebars, a sign warns: “Display Model Only”. Trinkets pile up on the carpet around the altar, burnt offerings of cigarette butts, an unused condom packet, coins, keys. No passing cleaner makes an effort to clean this up and it seems arranged in a perfect concentric ring. Skin hurts.

The resilient carpet is custom designed and can soak up blood, vomit and semen without leaving visible trace. A crazy man says he knows the man who made it and he makes a fortune, too. He also designs bodybags for prom queens addicted to cocaine and ultraviolent bondage. Did a crazy man really say that he knew a man? (Bringing new meaning to the game of ‘craps’, another urban legend tells of sliding compartments in the toilets that can quickly open to dispose of suicidal high-rollers who lost everything without bringing the corpse back through the main arena.) Very near by, another man looks over suspiciously at our furtive photographic activity, but then he seems distracted by what would appear to be an insect buzzing around his head. He bats at it but there is no insect anywhere to be seen. As we walk away, he seems to be madly shaking invisible bugs out of his hair. Is he shaking invisible bugs out of his hair?

The people no longer wish to be freed from their chains, preferring to use them to accessorise their designer handbags instead. Eyes pop.

The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incadescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

This green-skinned hepcat appeared to us as if in a dream, doffing his cap with sleazy grace. ‘Come with me to the Food Court’, he moaned in our already twitching ears. ‘I know a mystical place — a snack bar — where they spike the Alcoholic Super Slushies with Viagra, and where cyborg men with vat-grown muscle can inflate their pecs with a bicycle pump to 150psi. It’s called Food & Booze Express City and it’s open 24/7, natch, because you know it, don’t you, man, that Dreamland never sleeps. Oh, and dig: the women are unFUCKINGbelievable’.

Crawford gazed across the peninsula at the gutted shell of the Hollinger house.
‘A year from now some hotel or casino complex will stand there. On this coast the past isn’t allowed to exist.’
‘Why not keep the house as it is?’
‘As a tribal totem? A warning to all those time-share salesmen and nightclub touts? That’s not a bad idea…’

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights.

The final sane act of Nietzsche, that great admirer of self-serving individualism, was one of pity — to collapse to the floor and cradle a beaten horse. In this one compassionate act, he disavowed a lifetime of celebrating self-interest. At Crown, they have decapitated the horse and mounted its suffering head as a totem of gambling law: ‘Let he who is strong fill his pockets, and he who is weak empty his’.

This glowing tube filled with inanimate coin is in actuality a super-computer that runs on pure cash. Pulsing throughout that pile of super-compacted currency is a liquid charged with megawatts of electricity and data, a new breed of viscous fibre optics that draws upon the inordinate strength of abstract social wealth to create simulated neurological pathways with highly complex processing power greater than military mainframes. This super-computer runs the whole operation here at Crown Casino and it is called ‘Mr Severin’. Mr Severin’s word is law and he will not tolerate any deviance from that law at any time.

A lake of neon signs formed a shimmering corona, miles of strip-lighting raced along the porticos of the casinos, zipped up the illuminated curtain-walling of the hotels and spilled over into mushy cascades. Under the ultramarine sky, so dark now that the tone had left their faces, the spectacle of this sometime gambling capital seemed as unreal as an electrographic dream.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America.

We became touched by a presence that was almost entirely indescribable except in rhyming couplets of ever-increasing incredulity, ridiculous-sounding as we mouthed them aloud, like cod Shakespeare. An alien intelligence reaching deep into our souls to finger our pathetic humanity with a cold machinic rationalism that was actually a little bit naughty and a little bit nice. A mystical vision appeared — for we were in the circuit, now — a monolith slowly, slowly descending from the ceiling. White light grew and grew. In the zone.

‘Remember, Richard, consumerism is a redemptive ideology. At its best, it tries to aestheticize violence, though sadly it doesn’t always succeed.’
…
‘Every shopping mall and retail park turning into a local soviet. A popular uprising that starts at the nearest Tesco. It’s possible. There’s a hunger for violence, that’s why sport obsesses the whole country. Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines. That second bomb really got them going.’

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

While their wives indulged in the more passive pursuits of bingo and fruit machines, the mankind gathered in their pit to drink, watch high-volume, biff-and-bash contact sports and back their armchair punditry with hard cash. The more they drank, the more they lost. The more they lost, the more they drank. A gloom began to permeate the air, so much so that condensation seemed to drip from the walls like Amityville house blood, and one sensed that sporadic, remorseless violence might break out at any moment. On the sport screen, some rugby players tore off their clothes and compared biceps and for a moment it seemed the crowd might follow suit. Only one measure could prevent this — a variety show. Mr Severin: call on Elvissey!

Completely Elvis: The Elvises are in the building! Their uncanny sound and appearance will make you feel as if you are watching the King himself. Amazing musicianship elevates the entertaining and genuine portrayals of the famous songs we all know and love. The incredible authenticity of the show takes you on a ride that is unprecedented. Costumes, charisma and charm are coupled with the songs that made Elvis the undisputed ‘King of Rock and Roll’. This combination of artists is not like any ever seen in Australia before.

Crown Casino, 2009.

This man, this fat, tubular, tubercular man – his impersonation was no longer of Elvis, but of a thousand other Elvis impersonators. A discount simulacrum. His women had feathers up their bums and on their heads, and these vixens liked to conga-line to within an inch of some men’s lives. Beer boiling in the glass.

“The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich”

Hunter S. Thompson.

Projected above our heads, 20 feet high, on the big sports screen: the manifestation of schizoid hyperactivity.

Fleeting impressions, an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions. We’re talking about a virtual politics unconnected to any reality, one which redefines reality as itself. The public willingly colludes in its own deception.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

The horse equine reporter man reads the racehorse results, stutters in vertical hold, image flickers and splits straight down the middle to finally reveal the really real reality underneath. A snarling, digitised mutilation. Mr Severin has had a breakdown — someone, somewhere in here has won far too much cash. The system cannot cope, gets stuck in an infinity loop, cracks and breaks. The noise of clinking coin and tolling fruit-machine bells seems to increase to unbearable levels. But that is the great release, for we have pierced the veil, seen beyond, out into the desertified Racecourse of the Real. No gears and pulleys behind the mask, Phil K Dick-style, but a roiling, raging black void of utter nothingness.

Headaches and a necessary evacuation followed.

One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream. Marchers would drill and wheel while another cable announcer sang out the beat. In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

ABOVE: Ballard, late 60s. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

Vermilion Sands is a kind of cross between Palm Springs and Juan-les-Pins, a version of the leisure society we were about to enter, though for some reason we stopped and turned away at the door. Music by Brian Eno, metal foil architecture by Frank Gehry, dreams by Sigmund Freud, decor by Paul Delvaux.

J.G. Ballard, Literary Review, 2001.

Vermilion Sands is a synthetic and synaesthetic landscape of psychotropic houses that respond to their inhabitants’ desires and fears, singing sculptures, and a place where everything in sight seems to glitter, to take on the qualities of crystal, a flickering chromaticism suffusing everything from stairways to hair colour and eye pigments… could there be here a sort of affirmative retort to the insistence that all Modernist or utopian communities inevitably end up in dystopia?

Owen Hatherley, ‘Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse’.

It is a great injustice that Eno tends to be best known for either the “invention” of ambient music or for putting a slightly avant-garde gloss on sundry rock superstars. His records, and attendant theories, in the decade from 1972 to 1982 exhibit an astonishing range of modes and ideas, from the preening glam rock of Here Come the Warm Jets to the opiated drift of Discreet Music, the apocalyptic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to the deliberate blankness of Music for Airports. Without Eno as catalyst and protagonist, the landscape of popular music would be a far less interesting place: he popularised, through his own records and work with Bowie, Talking Heads and others, noise, sampling, studio-as-instrument, surface over “depth” and manifold other strategies against what was, by the early 1970s, a form in danger of becoming a hidebound arena of proper songs played on real instruments.

Owen Hatherley, ‘Father of Invention’.

ABOVE: Dionysian Eno. Photo via Kontrapunkt.

In another corner of his mind [Eno] was inventing ambient music. Recuperating from an accident, he asked a friend to leave a harp record on, and the one working speaker let its faint strings blend with wind and bird-song. Subliminally, he recognised that this was music. Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) announced a theory with, as the title suggested, much in common with JG Ballard’s eerie mundane modernity.

Nick Hasted, ‘Brian Eno, the professor of rock’.

SIMON SELLARS: You casually injected something interesting into our correspondence — that you see Ballard and Brian Eno as ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ I’m now going to pin you down and ask you to elaborate.

SIMON REYNOLDS: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again, as thinkers specifically about culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals. Certainly as people who came out of the Sixties but came into their prime – as artists and as influences – in the Seventies, they are these towering figures, I think.

One of my fantasy projects that I toyed with for a while was a book on Ballard and Eno. They do seem of a type in some ways and they are patron saints of postpunk to an extent. But the project founders immediately owing to the fact that they are so eloquent about what they do and such brilliant writers, that there’d be zero role for any critic or commentator. There’d be very little to mediate or interpret, as they’ve said it all, so much better. They know what they are doing. I suppose you could historicize them, contextualise them. Ballard with the milieu he emerged out of in the Sixties, which was based around the ICA, right? And Eno with the UK art schools.

In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything ideas-based. There’s this wonderful Englishness. You imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky and soda in the Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications. Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except much better because he’s a far better writer, and a better thinker too – more original, more convincing. Eno is almost like a British Barthes, in some ways.

‘”Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling”: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard connection’.

ABOVE: Ballard, mid-70s. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

SIMON SELLARS: When I interviewed Simon Reynolds, he said that Ballard and Brian Eno are ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ Given that Ballard and Eno are two of your major influences, do you agree with him?

COUSIN SILAS: I’ve never really considered Ballard or Eno as thinkers. To me one writes incredibly atmospheric music, the other writes incredibly atmospheric fiction. Both Ballard and Eno are probably my strongest influences, but their influence is very tenuous, difficult to explain. They both invoke that certain mood of isolation. Isolation is a funny thing: it can be forced upon one, or be self-invoked. It seems in today’s world, the last thing you’d really expect is isolation, and yet even in the busiest of places, there are attributes and situations where one can feel it totally. Self-invoked isolation is where the person chooses to step back, away from all the social interaction and so on, to become, in some respects, a suburban exile. I can relate to a lot of Ballard’s fiction and it’s much the same with Eno’s music, although to a lesser extent — Eno isn’t as consistent, and his vocal albums are something else. I don’t mind them, but for me it’s stuff like Music for Films, Apollo, Another Green World, plus a couple of his ambient albums and the two he did with Harold Budd that contain some of the most moody and atmospheric music there is.

‘Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard’.

ABOVE: Eno in 1975. Photo via Creative Technology.

SIMON SELLARS: How successful do you think Brian Eno’s Music for Airports was in providing a soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘future cities’? Eno wanted – in part — to reassure travellers who might be contemplating their death in a possible air crash, although Ballard seems to see the modern airport as a self-sufficient organism that already possesses this inbuilt function.

MIKE RYAN: If no airport is using his music, then I guess it was not successful. I own that CD, but I’ve never sat through the whole thing. I just get bored with it. If I want to contemplate death, I want complete silence, which of course we never can achieve. John Cage once recounted his experience in an anechoic soundproof chamber. When he was in there he asked the sound engineer what all that whooshing and thumping was that he could hear. Turned out that it was the blood rushing through his veins and his heart beating.

In regards to ‘future cities’, judging by recent articles by Nick Tosches and Mike Davis, it sounds like Dubai is the city of the future. Eno should do ‘Music for Dubai’ and see if it catches on. Maybe he could be the first Dubai superstar in the post-Las-Vegas world.

‘”No-one Dances in Ballard”: An Interview with Mike Ryan.’

ABOVE: Ballard in 1991. Photo by Craig McDean.

ABOVE: Appollonian Eno. Photo by Tom Pilston.

Bluewater: photo by James Boardman.

Further to yesterday’s post on Bluewater shopping centre, Michael Collins in the Guardian reports on the construction of Ebbsfleet, “Britain’s first new town of the 21st century”, taking place in the shadow of Bluewater.

Seeking to answer the question, “How do you create a characteristically 21st-century town in the baby years of the 21st century?”, Collins looks at the utopian visions of Edward Bellamy, H.G. Wells and William Morris before concluding that “the concern over what might happen when the masses became acquainted with luxury and leisure was the bugbear that united all these utopianists.”

Unsurprisingly, Collins references Sinclair and Ballard:

But the very thing that makes Ebbsfleet a totally 21st-century British concept is that it will not become a “prairie” town or a dormitory suburb gazing hopefully to the big smoke for its labour, luxury and leisure. This new town is not a suburb of London, but a suburb of Bluewater.

Housed on reclaimed land, which should appease the less hysterical environmentalists, here is the first community to be built around a temple to turbo-consumerism. “Virtual water, glass fountains, had replaced the tired Kentish shore as a place of pilgrimage,” wrote Iain Sinclair in an essay on the site, for the London Review of Books. “Bluewater,” he said, “is a Ballardian resort (Vermilion Sands), shopping is secondary, punters come here to be part of the spectacle.” In the risible Kingdom Come, JG Ballard himself has a shopping mall, clearly based on Bluewater, transforming into, of course, “a fascist state” controlled by armies of plebs distinguished by, of course, their white faces and a flag of St George.

For Collins, Ballard is on a par with those misguided, middle-class 19th-century utopianists who want to “keep luxury, leisure and filthy lucre in the hands of the few who knew what to do with them.” Ebbsfleet, he argues, due to judicious forward planning, will be less like a fascist shopping republic and more like a community that will not repeat the neo-Brutalist mistakes of the 60s, instead adroitly addressing “the issue of what unites and focuses a neighbourhood” by concentrating on effective transport and industry: “By the end of 2009, commuters will be propelled into King’s Cross from Ebbsfleet station in 17 minutes. Also, the 20,000 jobs promised might yet be possible.”

The suggestion that Ballard in Kingdom Come is snobbing “the plebs” is an old argument. Just after the book’s publication we heard it by way of Rod Liddle’s eulogy for the “working class” game of football. For Liddle, Kingdom Come is a “deeply silly and patronising novel, but it does at least encapsulate the contempt and lack of understanding with which working-class pastimes are viewed by our political leaders and, in Ballard’s case, our intelligentsia.”

But how much of the argument actually stands up? As far as the “new town” concept is concerned, we have Ballard’s oft-stated admiration for the hermetically sealed “non spaces” of 21st-century life, about as anti the “prairie town”, “dormitory suburb” mentality as Collins could wish for:

The catchment area of Heathrow extends for at least 10 miles to its south and west, a zone of motorways, intersections, dual carriageways, science parks, marinas and industrial estates, watched by police CCTV speed-check cameras, a landscape which most people affect to loathe but which I regard as the most advanced and admirable in the British Isles, and paradigm of the best that the future offers us.

Ballard, “Airports”, The Observer, September 14, 1997.

And as for Ballard’s perceived classism, this is most obviously undercut by Millennium People, which savages the middle classes, along with their complaints and separatist claims, by suggesting they are entirely complicit in their own problems. But remarkably, given the Liddle/Collins backlash, it’s Kingdom Come itself that consciously mocks Ballard’s own “privileged” world view with a number of sly digs at the public persona he increasingly has to labour under. The infamous line, “This author is beyond psychiatric help — do not publish”, was of course aimed at the original manuscript of Crash by a publisher’s reader, but in Kingdom Come it’s recycled by Ballard himself and used against Pearson, the narrator of the book (and Ballard proxy):

“Tell her to watch my commercials for David Cruise.”
“I did. She says there’s a new one. Something about a man laughing in an abattoir.”
“What did she think of it?”
“She said you’re beyond psychiatric help.”
“Good. That shows she’s warming to me.”

Ballard, Kingdom Come.

But it also includes this aside from Pearson, even more telling:

He probably knew that I was hostile to the mall, another middle-class snob who hated glitter, confidence and opportunity when they were taken up too literally by the lower orders.

Ballard, Kingdom Come.

What I find amusing is that here Ballard has exactly pre-empted the arguments of Liddle and Collins, which makes it seem a bit strange that they would conveniently skip this line in favour of using the self-same argument against him, stripping the author’s sharp self-awareness and replacing it with an image of Ballard as a conservative old fuddy duddy. After all, it’s Pearson who displays the most disturbing, megalomaniac tendencies of all. The book’s world is seen through the eyes of this “middle class snob” with all his privileges and his insulation from reality. How could it be anything less than one-dimensional, then, in its depictions of the stratum of society that its narrator fails to fully understand? And is it not the case that Pearson actually repents by book’s end, sees the error of his ways, admits he was wrong?

I just wonder if Collins has actually read the book. But I also wonder if these kinds of attacks on Ballard are a consequence of the way he has been absorbed by the English media, which is determined to preserve him in aspic as an avuncular heritage figure by defanging the ambiguities and ambivalences that make all his work, even the less successful iterations such as Kingdom Come (which I admit is far from Ballard’s best book), so powerful.

As I’ve noted before, Ben Noys makes the excellent point in his recent writings on Ballard that “while [Ballard’s] work is recognized as provocative and controversial, this is neutralized through the construction of an ‘eccentric’ authorial persona”. Noys sees this reductive process as deriving from the success of Empire of the Sun and the way in which that book’s “biographical keys” and Ballard’s subsequent public image have nullified some of the more extreme conclusions reached in his other fiction, especially the disturbing — and unanswered questions — Ballard raises about “regression, sexual deviance and the role of violence and radicalism in the arts”.

In the end Noys sees this nullification as a result of the stifling “constriction of the terms of literary and cultural debate in Britain”, and ends by calling for critical re-engagement with Ballard’s most urgent concerns.

Unfortunately we are still waiting.

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, weaving the history of Modernist architecture — especially the tradition of ‘ideal, radiant cities’ — into a close reading of the ‘Vermilion’ stories, Hatherley concludes:

…we need to look elsewhere to see what it is that causes the unambiguously seductive qualities of Vermilion Sands to veer off into the horrors of Eden-Olympia in Super-Cannes or the Estrella de Mar of Cocaine Nights … The inhabitants [of the latter two] are perfectly prepared to use the surrounding immigrant population as fodder for their entertainment much as they might have used the psychotropic houses and singing statues of [Vermilion Sands]. The most striking similarity is in the sense of a time both stood still and siezed by overwhelming technical advance. In that, Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse is both Modernism’s fulfilment and its repudiation, and Vermilion Sands, for all that it says of the leisure society that the post-Golden Age generations have been denied, is not so far from our present.”

You can find the paper at The Measures Taken.

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+ THE TAKING OF PELHAM

The illustrator David Pelham’s four vivid Ballard covers for Penguin in the 1970s have been cited as favourites by both our Ballardian cover experts, Rick McGrath and Rick Poynor. Now, over at Creative Review, in this transcript of a talk given by Pelham at the V&A in 2005, he guides us through the creation of these and many other covers, including the Ballards and one of my personal faves, the 1972 Penguin cover for A Clockwork Orange.

According to Pelham:

I met Jim Ballard through Eduardo Paolozzi. They were great friends. I was very familiar with Ballard’s work, having been a great admirer from way back. I admired the bleak style of his catastrophe novels – this being The Drought – and their heartless depiction of technological and human breakdown and decay. Grim perhaps, but wonderfully written. Drawn to the romance of his apocalyptic imagery I wanted to illustrate his covers myself. Consequently I quickly airbrushed this postcard sized image to show him the idea and talked to him about his other titles in the list. That’s how we started out. Here’s the finished job. I did a series of four which I think we have here to look at, together with a slipcase which we don’t.

It was a huge pleasure working so closely with Ballard, and I’m pleased to be able to report that the titles in these covers sold very well.”

Pelham also imparts some fascinating details about what it was like to work as a graphic designer and illustrator well before computers transformed the scene: “there was no pressing of buttons and getting a result there and then, no emails or jpegs or instant typesetting… In those days you often found yourself working around the clock because everything technical took so long … [ there were ] motorcycle messengers roaring around London in large crash helmets; and some days later I would see a proof. In those days, that was quick!”

[ Thanks Rick McG ]

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+ CRONENBERG/CRASH TRIBUTE SITE

A promising new site has come online, designed to scope out David Cronenberg’s film version of Ballard’s Crash for the unwary — including every idiot who prefers a Haggis to a Berg(er). It’s thorough, with in-depth, scene-by scene analyses, and comes with the as-yet-unfilled promise of “articles and commentary in June 2007″. According to Vaughan, the site moderator, ‘Crash is both a movie and a novel. For once, there is no competition between the two. Instead, they complement each other. The subject is inspirational, suggestive, and challenging. Hence a need for a random assortment of articles and commentary.’

So, bring ‘em on already.

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+ BALLARDIAN WORLD TOUR

Part 1 of the travelogue detailing my recent jaunt around Southeast England (with more than a nudge and a wink to this site) is now online at Sleepy Brain.