Ballardian

This is vaguely Ballardian: my two-minute short film based on the ‘reversible destiny’ theory of the architects/conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins.

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor.

JG Ballard and Iain Sinclair have often been cast in a simple narrative of compatible writers and thematic consistencies. David Cunningham’s wide-ranging article forces a new appreciation of this complex relationship.

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.

Rick McGrath continues to explore the aesthetic of the advertisement in J.G. Ballard’s work, from the early short stories right through to Kingdom Come.

Finally: the long-delayed conclusion to my photo essay, ‘”Paradigm of nowhere”: Shepperton, a photo essay’, in which I aim for the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain: the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories.

Mike Bonsall sets out on a mission to find The Real Concrete Island, and is surprised by what he finds: ‘Ballard must have walked the same streets that years later I was to haunt with my own damaged crew. Living within sight of the Westway, which I felt must have helped form his motorway mythology, I was moved to do some geo-detective work…’

Iain Sinclair and Will Self together on stage talking about Ballard, Orson Welles and CCTV. Garden gnomes, Simon Reynolds and John Lydon get roped into the ring, also.

Dr Robert Vaughan has a scarred penis. Describe it to me. Is his semen salty? Some semen is saltier than others. Let’s get rid of that gum — don’t want you blowing it up my urethra.

I’ve been asked to contribute to a documentary on car parks. Here then, as preparation, is my Ballardian Primer to Car Parks, with quotes from Ballard’s novels.

Iain Sinclair and Will Self on the same stage talking about psychogeography and Ballard? Who knew.

I’ve just come across news of a collection of essays, City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair. It came out in April 2007, but completely flew under my radar. If you click on ‘sample pdf’ at the bottom of that link, you’ll come across this: Chapter 11: Re-Placing the Novel: Sinclair, Ballard and the Spaces [...]

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, [...]

J.G. Ballard has a new piece in the Guardian on the Bilbao Guggenheim — ‘the larval stage of a new kind of architecture’. ‘This is Disneyland for the media studies PhD,’ Ballard writes, in observation of the Frank Gehry-designed building. ‘Cascades of golden light overpower the sun, rising from a jumble of massive titanium forms [...]

I reread Iain Sinclair’s BFI book on Cronenberg’s Crash recently as research for my article on the Crash! short film. I have to say I am amazed the BFI ever agreed to publishing it in a series about ‘modern film classics’. Cronenberg and the film take back stage to Sinclair’s virtuoso reconstruction of Ballard’s life [...]

Please forward to anyone that may be interested … TRIP: Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives Manchester, 19-22 June 2008. Call for Papers and Projects * * Psychogeography * * * Neogeography * * * Deep topography * * * Urban interventions * * * Locative media * * * Collaborative Mapping * * * Between June [...]

CRASH! (1971) from sdicht on Vimeo. 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, [...]

CRASH! (1971) from sdicht on Vimeo. ABOVE: Cokliss/Ballard on Vimeo. CRASH! Director: Harley Cokliss Writer: J.G. Ballard Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake This a transcript of the meta-narration and voiceover from the film CRASH!. See here for ‘Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon’, an appraisal of the film. NARRATOR: In slow motion, the test cars moved towards [...]

+ Three lovely Ballardian riffs… 1) Dan Lockton over at the awesome Architectures of Control, a blog that analyses the ways in which products are designed to restrict user behaviour, guides us through a new initiative at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5: the removal of seating so that patrons have no choice but to spend great [...]

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Michelle Lord has emailed me with some more information and stills from her show ‘Future Ruins’, now exhibiting at The Birmingham and Midland Institute, Margaret St., Birmingham B3 3BS UK. It’s on from June 15-23 and is part of Architecture Week 2007; see www.architectureweek.org.uk for further details. I’m fascinated [...]

+ CATALOGUE OF CONTEMPORARY ATROCITIES Jeannette Baxter, organiser of this weekend’s J.G. Ballard Conference at the University of East Anglia, delivers a challenging examination of Surrealist influences in Ballard’s Running Wild for Issue 5 of the online journal, Papers of Surrealism. ‘The Surrealist Fait-Divers: Uncovering Violent Histories in J. G. Ballard’s Running Wild’: Abstract In [...]

If you enjoyed our Sinclair interview and are curious to place a voice to the text, or you just need an entry point into Sinclair’s work, listen to Radio QBSaul, which podcasts “audio theatre, poetry, music and sound by Paul A Green and guests”. Paul is currently featuring a podcast from Mr Sinclair, Lud Heat, [...]

OPENING LINE: “In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’). From the 1996 Harper Collins edition: The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, [...]

OPENING LINE: “I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’). From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally [...]

Interview by Tim Chapman Iain Sinclair at the Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman, © 2006. Iain Sinclair has been acclaimed as one of Britain’s most visionary writers and as an incomparable prose stylist. His early writing, notably Lud Heat (1975) and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), was rooted in his adopted home of East London. It [...]

Jah Wobble, John Lydon’s old mucker and former bassist for Public Image Ltd, has reviewed the Pocket Essentials guide to Psychogeography, by Merlin Coverley. It’s an odd little review. Wobble gets headaches from the concepts on offer and writes that “you will always find marginal blokes walking in marginal (urban) places”, while expounding the belief [...]

by Simon Sellars an image from John Foxx’s Cathedral Oceans project John Foxx, the former lead singer of Ultravox, is an undisputed electronic music pioneer. Before Midge Ure came along, the band’s three Foxx-driven albums, Ultravox! (1977), Ha! Ha! Ha! (1978) and Systems of Romance (1978), fused near-future melancholy with icy man-machine interfaces and the [...]

According to the BBC, a group of boffins are using a new techno toy to determine “how dubious a development project will be”, using Cannes as a model. However, instead of looking at the effects of pollution and the play of light, it seems to me they could have saved a lot of money and [...]

Leonard Pierce participates in Coudal Partners’ Field-Tested Books project, “our version of the Heisenberg principle: reading a certain book in a certain place uniquely affects a person’s experience with both. The writing you’ll find here is grounded in that idea. You won’t find any book reviews here. You’ll find reviews of experience”. Leonard’s choice is [...]

Matt over at Mountain 7 has posted an interesting account of Whiteley Village in England, with accompanying photos, that will be immediately familiar to lovers of Ballardian landscapes: “Wikiedia: ‘Whiteley is a new town in the county of Hampshire, England, near Fareham. The town straddles two council districts: the borough of Fareham to the south [...]

Judging from this recent interview with Iain Sinclair, it appears that Ballard is to write a piece for an upcoming anthology of writings about London, to be published by Hamish Hamilton. Petit, Sinclair, Moorcock and Ballard in the one place is A-OK by me. “SINCLAIR: I take great delight in the apparently forgotten. As Ed [...]

JG Ballard talks about Ian Sinclair’s latest book “Edge of the Orison” in the Observer, Sunday 27th November: “Iain Sinclair walks every inch of his wonderful novels and psycho-geographies, pacing out huge word-courses like an architect laying out a city on an empty plain. But every book is really a blueprint for something else and [...]