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Archive for the ‘micronations’ Category

“Extreme Possibilities”: Mapping “the sea of time and space” in J.G. Ballard’s Pacific fictions

By Simon Sellars • Aug 23rd, 2009 •

Category: Japan, Lead Story, Pacific, Shanghai, WWII, academia, alternate worlds, features, inner space, memory, micronations, nuclear war, war

What’s the connection between J.G. Ballard, Hakim Bey and Fredric Jameson? Tracking Ballard’s surreal visions of nuclear conflict to Ground Zero in the Pacific, the paper maps his peculiar, irradiated sense of “affirmative dystopias”, a template for his more enduring urban works (famously, Crash) that, finally, intersects in striking ways with the writings of Bey and Jameson.



Crown Casino: ‘A snarling, digitised mutilation’

By Simon Sellars Melb Psy • May 27th, 2009 •

Category: Australia, CCTV, Lead Story, advertising, alternate worlds, architecture, audio, boredom, consumerism, death of affect, deep time, fascism, features, hyperreality, leisure, micronations, occult, perception, photography, psychogeography, schizophrenia, surveillance, temporality, time travel, utopia

Simon Sellars, Mel Chilianis and Melb Psy take an audiovisual tour of Melbourne’s Crown Casino, seeking to map the coordinates of this micronational zone — consumer-driven control space with a raging need.



Kingdom of the Dead

By Simon Sellars • Aug 5th, 2008 •

Category: America, Ballardosphere, alternate worlds, body horror, consumerism, death of affect, film, gated communities, horror, humour, micronations, urban revolt

Parallels between Ballard’s Kingdom Come and Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.



'Engineering the moral order': Strange Housing Communities

By Simon Sellars • Jun 16th, 2008 •

Category: Australia, Ballardosphere, CCTV, alternate worlds, architecture, gated communities, micronations, paranormal

Where can one find the world’s strangest housing communities? Here is a handy list.



'Vomit, violence, tabloid architecture…'

By Simon Sellars • Mar 11th, 2008 •

Category: Australia, Ballardosphere, architecture, celebrity culture, fascism, media landscape, micronations, psychology, sport, television, urban revolt

MelbPsy gets all Atrocity Exhibition on the House that Sam Newman built, the ‘tabloid architecture’ sheathing yet another backyard Aussie micronation.



Demanding the Impossible

By Simon Sellars • Dec 3rd, 2007 •

Category: Australia, Ballardosphere, Fredric Jameson, Pacific, academia, alternate worlds, dystopia, micronations, utopia

All Melbourne crew are welcome to come and heckle me this Wednesday (Dec 5, 1pm) at Monash University.



Minimal Concrete City for Sale: Serious Interested Parties Only!

By Simon Sellars • Sep 30th, 2007 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Borges, WWII, alternate worlds, architecture, gated communities, micronations

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 [...]