Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Drawing inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars in 1970, the Crashman presents his own festival of Atrocity films: aviation disasters set to musical soundtracks.

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

Phil Smith of the wonderful Wrights & Sites collective has sent me information on forthcoming ‘walk-orientated performances, events and objects’. While not explicitly linked to Ballard, various themes and preoccupations will be familiar to readers of this site:
First of all the show I have written based on my Easter 2007 walk following the route of […]

In 2005 the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) announced a subsection of the event called ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’:
‘Has a festival of Atrocity films ever been held? — JG Ballard, 1990.’
Yes. You are looking at it JG. Welcome to The Atrocity Exhibition our maliciously mad and mischievously misanthropic look at the world around us. Yes […]

+ 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 this paper […]

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 […]

From the Guardian, Friday September 23, 2005
“David Cronenberg’s films are full of images that make us recoil in horror. But what we are really trying to hide from is the whole messy business of being alive. By JG Ballard”
“Are we all, without realising it, taking part in a vast witness protection programme? Did we observe, […]

by J.G. Ballard (1995)
The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising […]

by J.G. Ballard (1994)
The day-dream of being marooned on a desert island still has enormous appeal, however small our chances of actually finding ourselves stranded on a coral atoll in the pacific. But Robinson Crusoe was one of the first books we read as children, and the fantasy endures. There are all the fascinating problems […]

by William Burroughs (1970)
The Atrocity Exhibition is a profound and disquieting book. The nonsexual roots of sexuality are explored with a surgeon’s precision. An auto-crash can be more more sexually stimulating than a pornographic picture. (Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content […]