Ballardian

Jordi Costa, the curator of J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium, currently exhibiting at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, gifts us this incisive analysis of the major themes in Ballard’s work. Accompanying the essay is the alternate version of the exhibition’s promo trailer.

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

Banksy’s latest masterpiece.

To celebrate the new version of the wonderful SurveillanceSaver software, here is The Ballardian Primer to Surveillance Cameras, with all quotes taken from Ballard and all images lifted from the Axis CCTV network.

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

Entries have closed for the Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. More soon…

Reminder: six days left to submit your entry for the Ballardian Home Movie Competition. Here is some extra background…

Announcing The 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies, a competition for 1-minute films shot on mobile phones. This is to promote JGB’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life, and the prize is a copy of Miracles plus 5 Ballard back titles. Presented by ballardian.com and HarperCollins.

Recently, Toronto’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy passed on to Rick McGrath a binder containing a slew of Canadian JGB reviews, Ballardian esoterica and the jewel in the crown: a long, unpublished interview with Ballard from 1974.

I’m slowly coming up for air after being buried alive by work and study. To everyone whose links, articles, essays and features I’ve promised to post, I’ll begin to work through the backlog over the next few days. By the way, what does it mean when you dream about trying to enter a church, but [...]

Image from Diet Soap #1.
+ Following on from my rapture at discovering the SurveillanceSaver software, here are some more portals onto mediated inner space.
Chris Nakashima-Brown brings news of issue 1 of the fabulous zine, Diet Soap. The theme is Surveillance and there are poems, palindromes, fiction, reportage and lots of excellent collaged art, including (so [...]

Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell. Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere…
J.G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights (1996).
Every good Ballardian needs this: SurveillanceSaver, a screensaver that [...]

Dominika Oramus reads Ballard’s work as a record of the gradual internal degeneration of Western civilization: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West.

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 [...]

Photo: Eamonn McCabe.
Lee Rourke at the Guardian’s book blog has posted on Ballard, casting his vote for JGB as Britain’s ‘greatest living author’ and Crash as the ‘most prophetic novel written by a British writer in the last 50 years’.
Lee has some sharp observations:
Crash is the definitive novel of technocentrism: where the blurring of [...]

Technovelgy is an intriguing site that explores the inventions of science fiction writers. And while we don’t often think of J.G. Ballard as a writer of predictive, ‘hard’ science fiction (ie, he’s never been bothered with imagining the shape of far-future technology, Asimov style, being far more interested in mapping out the psychological effects of [...]