ABOVE: Richard Gere as Blake: more vapourware…

None of my books are being made into films at the moment, all is quiet. A lot of Philip K. Dick’s books have been filmed; they fit the American mood. His novels are very paranoid and I think that touches a nerve in America.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed in SFX magazine, 2007.

I have been working my way through a stack of Ballard interviews from the 70s and 80s, and one consistent note is JGB’s regret at never cracking the American market. But his US stocks might have been very different if a few more of the film options taken out on his books had come to fruition, an observation brought home to me after reading David Pringle’s 1990 conversation with Ballard (published in Fear magazine and kindly sent to me by Martin J.).

In this interview there is much tantalising detail about these vapourware films, including the news that Steven Spielberg’s partner Kathy Kennedy was keen to option Running Wild a couple of years after Spielberg’s film of Empire. Ballard, however, feared it was “slightly too strong a dish for Spielberg” while speculating that “one of those John Carpenter directors might have fun with it”. He also talks of stalled development on a proposed film of The Day of Creation, before bemoaning the fact that “nobody has ever got it together” to film Concrete Island, despite the fact it has “been continuously optioned ever since it was published” and that it “would be quite easy and cheap to film”. The latest option on Concrete Island (at the time, 1990), Ballard reveals, was from someone in Australia!

But the biggest revelation is that Richard Gere wanted to make a film of The Unlimited Dream Company. According to Ballard:

Richard Gere … has taken an option on The Unlimited Dream Company with a view to playing the hero himself. I met him in London and was very impressed by him — highly articulate, thoughtful, serious-minded. He’s very interested in Buddhism, does work on behalf of various Buddhist missions. Reincarnation through one species to another is very much a part of Buddhist thought, and obviously that is what intrigued him about the novel. What would have been the insuperable obstacle of filming the flying sequences is no problem these days — they can do that extremely convincingly. But one must assume, to be sensible, that nothing will come of it.

Richard Gere as Blake! The mind curdles! I wonder if Gere intended to keep the Shepperton setting? Perhaps it would have suffered a fate similar to the remake of The Wicker Man, sadly ripped from its pagan context on a remote Scottish isle and relocated to a “repressive matriarchal” island off the coast of Washington. In any case, Gere’s star was soaring at that time, riding on the back of Pretty Woman, so I imagine the film would have exposed Ballard similarly, the way Spielberg pulled him into his slipstream.

Well, with all this new info addling my brain, I thought I’d compile a list of Ballard’s brushes and near-brushes with the film world. If anyone has any more info, I’d be glad to receive it.

BOOKS

The Drought (1964)
According to JGB in 1976:

I … wrote a script from my early novel The Drought, which was bought up for TV by David Frost, but he’s never used it.

And 20 years later:

People have tried to buy [the rights] back from David Frost, but he’s put an incredibly high price on them, so I’m afraid that novel will remain unfilmed… Hazel Adair [who bought the rights with Frost] read the novel, and she was very familiar with my stuff. She just wanted to film it straight, as it was. She saw it as exotic, with a strong story — when the taps run dry what do people do? You take it for granted that you’ll be able to find water somewhere if the taps run dry, but if the rivers run dry as well you’ve got a problem on your hands. Against that background, there is this urban disaster story going on, with the characters losing their suburban virtues and becoming more and more archetypal. So I think she saw it as having good roles, and all the rest of it. But, ah well, this was 25 years ago; I think it was ‘69 when they bought the rights, and by then, of course, the British film industry had just fallen through the grilles in the floor.

Quoted in Ballard’s 1996 interview with David Pringle for SFX magazine.

The Crystal World (1966)
According to JGB (again, from the 1996 Pringle):

The Crystal World has been optioned quite a few times over the years. I think the film-makers are attracted to the visual possibilities of the crystallizing forest, and crystallizing helicopters and crocodiles and the like, but it would be very difficult to portray convincingly.

The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
Filmed by Jonathan Weiss in 2000.

Crash (1973)

ABOVE: Jack Nicholson in Crash: “Heeere’s Vaughnie!”

1) Filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996.
2) B.C. (Before Cronenberg), Ballard told the RE/Search crew:

I’ve seen a filmscript of Crash by a very good English writer named Heathcote Williams. Some film company wanted Jack Nicholson to star in it. This version was set in Los Angeles with American characters, an American landscape — obviously that’s where the money is to make movies. It was a genuine translation, not just of language but of everything. I didn’t really like it. It was almost Disneyfied — “Walt Disney Productions presents Crash!”

Concrete Island (1974)
1) According to JGB in 1976:

I wrote a script from my novel Concrete Island, that a French director wanted to film. That was last summer. I don’t know if he’ll actually make the film.

2) Option from someone in Australia, as above (1990).
3) According to JGB in 1996 (SFX interview):

A French company holds the option at present, and is developing it: whether they can actually get the money together to finance it I don’t know.

High-Rise (1975)
1) Currently in development hell with Vincenzo Natali attached.
2) Optioned in the 1970s with Nic Roeg as director and Paul Mayersberg as scriptwriter. Roeg and Mayersberg of course made The Man Who Fell to Earth, a bittersweet reminder of what might have been: sweet because it’s such an amazing film, bitter because it’s not Ballard.
3) Bruce Robinson, writer/director of Withnail and I, wrote a High-Rise script in 1979. According to an IMDB commenter:

Bruce put a lot of work into it. He researched the architectural side of the story, as well as some particularly gruesome torture devices available to ‘ordinary’ people. He was commissioned by Euston Films, ending up writing a $35 million film. It was dumped because Bruce believed it would never be made. Please read ‘Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson’ by Alistair Owen, for more about this script.

The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Optioned by Richard Gere, as above.

Empire of the Sun (1984)
Filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987.

The Day of Creation (1987)
1) “Some interest”, as above.
2) In a 1987 interview, it was noted: “There are no immediate plans for a movie version of The Day of Creation, although Ballard says, ‘My film agent is getting a lot of response from directors and producers.’”

Running Wild (1988)
1) Interest from the Spielberg camp around 1990, as above.
2) In 2003, Samuel L. Jackson was bitten. Running Wild was supposed to be filmed by David Leland (Mona Lisa, Wish You Were Here), starring Samuel as “a forensic psychiatrist who investigates an unusual crime on a Pacific Northwest island. Running Wild is slated for production summer 2004 on Vancouver Island. The producers have partnered with Alliance Atlantis for this project.” Although the film was headed for the Wicker Man route, relocated to an American island, it, too, disappeared off the face of the earth.

UPDATE…
Sam is back in the game!

Cocaine Nights (1996)
1) Last year, Andy Harries, one of the producers of The Queen, optioned Cocaine Nights with Peter Webber (Girl with A Pearl Earring; Hannibal Rising) attached as director.
2) According to my snout, Tim C., Paul Mayersberg was set to write a Cocaine Nights miniseries for ITV. It never came through, of course.

Super-Cannes (2000)
In 2002 Jeremy Thomas (Naked Lunch; Crash) optioned Super-Cannes for John Maybury (Love is the Devil; The Jacket) to direct from a script by Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth; Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence; Croupier). At the time Thomas said, ‘Until we have a finished script there can be no decisions on casting, budget or start of shoot.’ Can we assume that Mayersberg never delivered that script, since the production has completely disappeared off the map? By the way, in Ballardian terms, that makes three strikes for Mayersberg: Crash, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. None of them happened.

SHORT STORIES

The Vermilion Sands stories (1957-70)
According to Tim C., in 2000 the BBC planned a series based on Vermilion Sands:

This from a posting to the JGB list (no one ever managed to dig up further details): “The BBC is producing Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence and working on adaptations of Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Kingsley Amis’ Take a Girl Like You, JG Ballard’s Vermillion Sands and Alex Garland’s Tesseract.”

‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
As Tim C. notes, there was a mooted “BBC opera version of ‘The Sound Sweep’, as mentioned in Judith Merrill’s anthology England Swings SF (1968) and nowhere else.”

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
Filmed by Peter Potter in 1964 for BBC television.

‘Minus One’ (1963)
Filmed by Simon Brook in 1991.

‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
Filmed as Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude by Solveig Nordlund in 2002.

‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
Filmed as Home by Richard Curson-Smith for BBC television in 2003.

Special mention must be made of Crash!, the 1971 short film made by Harley Cokliss for the BBC. It stars Ballard and is based on fragments from The Atrocity Exhibition as well as drawing from various ideas Ballard was working on at the time. I always assumed Ballard wrote the script, but in the SFX interview he reveals it was in fact Cokliss:

The screenplay, or whatever you want to call it, wasn’t written by me; it was written by Cokliss. So I just did what he told me. He’d say, ‘walk across the roof of this multi-storey car park, Jim, and get into that car,’ so I’d do that. I think I wrote a voice-over, which I remember recording at Ealing Studios. But I can scarcely remember the film. I’ve no idea whether it was any good or not. The past is another country.

I’d say Ballard did write the voiceover, not Cokliss, given it features concepts that would later pop up in his non-fiction pieces and in the introduction to Crash. We’ll give Harley credit for the actual shooting script, though.

ORIGINAL SCRIPTS

‘Gulliver in Space’ (1964)
Original script for this episode of Jackanory, the British children’s show. According to JGB: “I really wrote it for my children, who were keen viewers at the time.”

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

ABOVE: “Ooooga Booga…” Imogen Hassall as Ayak, Magda Konopka as Ulido and Victoria Vetri as Sanna in When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. “No dialogue, just a lot of grunts” said Ballard.

Screen treatment for Val Guest’s prehistoric potboiler. According to JGB in a 1991 interview with Pringle and Richard Kadrey:

Back in the 60s, Hammer Films made a remake of the original One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch. The remake was a success, and they decided to make a sequel to their remake. They asked if I would do the original treatment, which I did. This was a film without dialogue, you would just hear a lot of grunts. I didn’t actually write a script; the shooting script was written by the director. For my treatment, I got a ’screen credit’, my only screen credit up till Empire of the Sun. I’m very proud that my first screen credit was for what is, without doubt, the worst film ever made. An appallingly bad film that only distantly resembled anything in my original treatment.

While in Miracles of Life he really goes to town:

I was contacted by a Hammer producer, Aida Young, who was a great admirer of The Drowned World. She was keen that I write the screenplay for their next production, a sequel to One Million Years BC… She steered me into the office of Tony Hinds, then the head of Hammer. He was affable but gloomy, and listened without comment as Aida launched into a chapter-by-chapter account of The Drowned World, with its picture of a steaming, half-submerged London and its vistas of dream-inducing water.

… Hinds asked me what ideas I had come up with. Bearing in mind that the promised contract had yet to arrive, I had given little thought to the project, but on the drive from Shepperton to Soho I had produced several promising ideas. I outlined them as vividly as I could.

‘Too original’ Hinds commented. Aida agreed. ‘Jim, we want that Drowned World atmosphere.’ She spoke as if this could be sprayed on, presumably in a fetching shade of jungle green.

Hinds then told me what the central idea would be. His secretary had suggested it that morning. This was nothing less than the story of the birth of the Moon — in fact, one of the oldest and corniest ideas in the whole of science fiction, which I would never have dared to lay on his desk. Hines stared hard at me. ‘We want you to tell us what happens next.’

I thought desperately, realising that the film industry was not for me. ‘A tidal wave?’

‘Too many tidal waves. If you’ve seen one tidal wave you’ve seen them all.’

A small light came on in the total darkness of my brain. ‘But you always see the tidal waves coming in,’ I said in a stronger voice. ‘We should show the tidal wave going out! All those strange creatures and plants…’ I ended with a brief course in surrealist biology.

There was a silence as Hinds and Aida stared at each other. I assumed I was about to be shown the door.

‘When the wave goes out…’ Hinds stood up, clearly rejuvenated, standing behind his huge desk like Captain Ahab sighting the white whale. ‘Brilliant. Jim, who’s your agent?’

We went out to a glamorous lunch in a restaurant with Roman decor. Hinds and Aida were excited and cheerful, already moving on to the next stage of production, casting the leading characters. I failed to realise it at the time, but I had already reached the high point of my usefulness to them. I should have heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the ebbing tidal wave, but it was exciting to have an idea taken up so quickly and be plied with enthusiasm, friendship and fine wine. Already they were discussing the complex relationships between the principal characters, difficult to envisage in a film with no dialogue, where emotions were expressed solely in terms of bare-chested men hitting each other with clubs or dragging a handsome blonde into a nearby cave by her hair. In due course I prepared a treatment, some of which survived into the finished film, along with my ebbing wave.

As Hammer films go, it was a success, but I am glad that they misspelled my name in the credits [as 'J.B. Ballard'].

NOVELIZATIONS

Alien (1979)
Ballard was offered $20,000 to write the novelization of Alien, Ridley Scott’s classic film, a job which went to Alan Dean Foster in his stead. As Ballard told Pringle in 1984:

It was surprisingly easy to turn down. I wouldn’t mind doing the novelization of Alphaville, or even Huston’s Moby Dick or Hawks’s Big Sleep (Welles’s Macbeth would pose some problems).

(Still, there does appear to be some evidence that Ballard gave the Alien project more than a glancing thought…)

But despite what Ballard says in the Miracles quote above, that “the film industry was not for me”, in the SFX interview he actually regrets not being more closely involved with film. In fact, he sounds a little down about it. This is another interview I’ve just come across recently, and from it I was rather surprised to learn that Ballard’s burning passion was to write original screenplays and to collaborate with a gun director, forming a similar partnership to Graham Greene and Carol Reed.

Let me just catch my breath for a bit…

Someone really, really should have made that happen.

(But then again, precious egos would be at stake: today’s director’s are far too focused on writing their own scripts, to the detriment of good storylines.)

Here are Ballard’s closing remarks from the SFX interview:

I’ve had a lot of invitations, in recent years, to write a drama series — or to write original plays in the days when they existed. But I’ve always declined them because I’m not at my best working with a committee, and television is a world entirely made up of committees. It’s a huge collaboration. That doesn’t suit me. Cinema is quite different, actually; film is entirely driven by one or two people at the most — usually the producer first. The creative importance of the producer is underestimated by people who think that cinema is entirely the work of the director.

Not true: in my contacts with the film world, the producers have been more important than the directors, really (Spielberg and Cronenberg are virtually their own producers). Films are driven by (a) the producer, and then (b) the director, and you’re dealing usually with one person. I’ve never worked in film, and I regret that very much. Because I’ve always responded so to film, I regret that I’ve never been able to collaborate with a director I felt close to or in sympathy with — in the way that, say, Graham Greene was able to collaborate with Carol Reed. It’s a pity, but it just never happened, partly because most of my career as a writer has coincided with a period of two or three decades when the British film industry has virtually ceased to exist. Had my career as a writer begun 20 years earlier, say in the 1940s, probably more of my novels would have been filmed and I might well have got involved with some sort of simpatico director. But now it’s too late.

Firstly, John emailed to inform me of a new Washington Times interview with David Cronenberg, in which the Baron of Blood makes this rather curious remark:

There’s an eroticism involved, certainly in ‘Crash,’ and I really saw that in the beheading videos. They looked like homosexual gang rapes with all the chanting and so on. It was pretty obvious to me, though [the terrorists] would be in total denial about that. There are strange, perverse elements to violence.

Meanwhile, Amplification, a dance performance based on stories of victims of automobile accidents, was choreographed by Phillip Adams (a Melbourne fellow like me, I note) and recently performed in Albany in the US:

“Amplification,” inspired in part by J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel “Crash” and David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation, takes the harrowing elements of a head-on collision and injects them, surprisingly, with grace and humor. The movements of a body in a crash ricocheting against the steering wheel, flipping upside down, being ejected out a window are translated into extended dance sequences. In another section, dancers are folded and rolled on the floor inside white sheets that resemble shrouds.

[ via TimC ]

Finally, the ‘philosophical prankster’ Tom McCarthy was interviewed recently in the Independent, and Ballard was invoked as an influence. On top of this, it’s worth going back to an interview with McCarthy from late last year, where he has some pertinent things to say about Crash:

Ballard says we’ve collapsed the future into the present and we’re surrounded by fictions and fantasies from which we can pick at will. He says that the writer’s job is to invent the reality. I like that, that’s very good.
…
Crash was a big influence. It’s more the repetition side of things than the technology. Ballard’s hero Vaughan re-enacts car crashes of the rich and famous. He’s also obsessed with becoming authentic, as is Ballard-the-character-in-the-book. He keeps saying things like ‘the car crash was the first real thing that had happened to me’. The heroes of both Crash and Remainder use re-enactment and stylised violence as a portal towards the real – and fail spectacularly, excessively, luxuriously.
…
Ballard is fascinating because he’s a great writer without even being a good one. I don’t mean this negatively: I’m a huge fan. But he doesn’t care about polished prose (compare his sentences to Nabokov or Updike and they look like pulp) or depth of character. Having said that, Crash has an intense lyricism that comes from its almost incantatory, modulated repetition of technological and sociological terms, and Vaughan is a much truer presence for me than, say, some boring ‘rounded’ figure out of Jane Austen. That’s the great thing about Ballard: he’s got a vision, he’s a visionary, that makes him great, and the niceties he doesn’t bother with. He knows exactly where he stands in this respect. I talked to him once and told him my theory that Crash was a re-write of Don Quixote, whose hero also re-enacts stylised violent moments on the public highways in a bid for ‘authenticity’, and also fails fabulously – and he answered: ‘Your theory is great, but I’ve never read Don Quixote. I don’t really read proper books, I’m very low-brow.’ Genius.

Isabelle Jenniches, originally from Germany, is a multimedia artist now based in California. With collaborator Stefan Kunzmann she staged a theatre adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel Concrete Island at the Theater de Balie, Amsterdam, in 2002. The performance incorporated aspects of Butoh as well as an industrial/ambient soundtrack, projections and video; it was stunningly innovative, and stripped back Ballard’s already minimal text to an almost subliminal level, focusing on subconscious tropes and the nightmarish dream world that lay just below the surface of the original novel. The result was a poetic meditation on myth and perception, and the subjective nature of reality, as mediated through a technological lens.

I spoke with Isabelle about her and Stefan’s adaptation of JG Ballard’s work, as well as her ongoing artistic obsessions. Fittingly, for an artist so obsessed with telepresence, we conducted this interview via ICQ.

– Simon Sellars

How did you and Stefan hook up as a team?

We have been friends for…over 10 years! We studied together in Vienna and then somehow became interested in the same things. I started this postgraduate new-media program in the Netherlands, which was a total surprise to everyone as I had not even as much as seen a computer before. Anyway, I was really into it and then he came over and studied there too. Then after that, we both moved to Amsterdam.

Do you have any plans to return to Germany, like Stefan?

No, I could never do that. I have been away for so long, and I don’t know the place any more. I never much liked it anyway. I knew I would go away as soon as I was conscious enough to make decisions for myself.

Why did you both decide to stay in Amsterdam to create art? Did you find it to be a stimulating artistic community?

Yes, that was my initial reason. I’d done an exchange student year at the Rietveld Academie, when I was studying scenography, and I was really impressed by the theatre in Amsterdam. However, some things have changed since then. Now I find the theatre scene, especially, pretty uninspired and not at all daring enough, particularly when it comes to so-called new media. There were a handful of very talented and ambitious visionaries that were trying to set things up a couple years ago, but it somehow evaporated and nothing took its place. I guess there were isolated attempts, but I can’t say that I feel a part of a greater movement or that there’s any kind of exchange going on. I’m sure there are pockets where this is different, but this is my personal experience. Amsterdam is very different from, let’s say New York, which is this highly underfunded, but highly artistic and high-spirited environment where people just support each other because they have to! I was there for 9 months last year and it was blowing me away!

It seems that a lot of things are being stifled in the Netherlands these days. For example, the red-light district is not what it used to be, and the police are taking a very hard line on soft drugs. What do you think is going on?

Well, since the government changed towards the conservatives the arts have had a hard time, but I think it goes beyond the kind of government, in that the Dutch have the tendency to bureaucratise everything. People don’t take chances; they don’t just go for it.

I find the Netherlands totally fascinating, especially the concept of privacy. It’s such a small place and there are so many people crammed in, it’s like private space doesn’t really exist. I was wondering if that’s perhaps part of the reason why the Netherlands was able to invent Big Brother for TV?

Yes. There’s the famous cliche about Dutch people having no curtains and everybody looking inside everyone else’s house – we all do it! It may seem like everything’s out in the open, but the other side is that it becomes very hard to make contact. People are afraid of speaking out, of overstepping the invisible tolerance line. Everybody is free to do whatever they want – which is great – but you won’t get much comment, either neither negative nor positive, so it’s as if it doesn’t matter. After a while here, I was longing for a good fight!

Stefan told me that your adaptation of Concrete Island was a reflection on the superficial nature of Dutch culture, where everything floats on a surface level. Amsterdam seems wild to some people, for example, but below the surface it can actually be quite conservative; also you say the Dutch arts are funded, but there’s no real artistic individuality.

Concrete Island is so not Amsterdam that I cannot quite relate to that!

OK! Stefan warned me that when I spoke to you that you would disagree with what he said.

He was right!

So how do you see the work then? What was in your mind when you adapted Concrete Island? What do you want people to get out of it?

I don’t quite think like that. I mean, I can’t dictate what people will see or not see. I can only create what I see and make it come to life. In the case of Ballard, it is very much a fantasy, a wonderfully detailed world that I can really lose myself in. I would hope that my public feels at least a bit of that same fascination. Think of it as a journey – we set the pace and provide the means of transport and choose the route, but you are free to look out this or that window or to wear a pair of pink glasses or to read a book instead! Of course, this is an unusual concept for a theatre maker, which is probably why I am not really a theatre maker now at all!

Right, I see what you’re saying, but I guess I would still like to know if you have an interpretation of the novel, something that maybe guided you when adapting it. For example, I see it as a comment on technology, and how we are subservient to it – Maitland merges with the island, with the car, really, and he becomes a kind of post-human figure. I also see the events of the book as maybe taking place inside his head.

I think what I most liked when reading the novel – long before I even thought about adapting it – was Maitland’s slow change from civilised human to something else. This change took place in the middle of this civilised world, under everyone’s noses, but they were totally blind to it. At the end of our production of Concrete Island, our Maitland has become something like a lizard; that was the image.

I saw a video rough cut of the performance and I was really impressed by the whole set up: the stylised island, the subliminal images flashing behind, the stylised acting that propelled Maitland. I’m just wondering if your audience was quite prepared for something so conceptual?

No, probably not, although if they knew us, they should have been! We came up with the concept and the stage design together, but then when things got closer to the actual production process we had to split up because the workload became too much, and – this is interesting – we discovered what each of us can and cannot do! So Stefan was really good at working with the actors, whereas I am pretty much a failure at this. Stefan also adapted the text for the stage – an enormous amount of work. He wrote a beautiful script, where all the different layers were lined up next to each other. I did all of the video shoots and editing and linking it with the text and so on. That’s what we do – it’s like composing a piece of music. The script resembles sheet music.

Why did you choose Concrete Island? Why not another Ballard novel? Is it because the book is such a condensed version of Ballard’s ideas, and therefore easily adapted to another medium? Also, it’s set in a very contained space, so I’m guessing that probably made it easier to perform.

Yes, exactly. It really is this compactness that is intriguing. It has all the attributes of a good theatre play: a compact but well-defined cast, as well as the unity of space and seemingly of time, if you take it literally. But of course all that gets questioned in the end: has he been dying all the way through, and have we just witnessed the fabled speeding up of time just before death? Did he dream it all? Concrete Island is so much about intensity, an intensity that we loose in our civilised world. I’m not being romantic, but when Maitland goes back in time, so to speak, he becomes this other being. It’s actually very primordial; as he loses his humanity piece by piece, he fights for survival but also for the right of being king of this ‘island’. That’s fascinating to me, because without saying that this is a better world, Ballard reminds us about those intense, cruel streaks in us, that no matter how civilised we are, they are a part of us. Now these days, we have horrible images on TV and it’s so sickening, and we can’t escape it – but that’s not even the animal in us, it’s deeper than that. It’s about awareness instead of denial – it’s a part of being human and you have to deal with it! That’s why Ballard is important and that’s exactly why he’s so controversial.

The Souvenir project you did with Stefan is interesting, where you use the concept of travellers moving in and out of Amsterdam to present an alternative view of the city. It’s like you are using the concept of time travel to present a past, present and future history of Amsterdam. How did the audience respond to that?

Well, we started off with a round-table discussion about Amsterdam, then people were taken totally by surprise as 18 minutes of media saturation suddenly made them sit straight up in their seats: slides and video, voices on tape, frogs… People liked it actually, but we always get asked “Why so much and all at once?” Well, this is how I experience the world – I multitask all day long, so why should I stop when I am creating a performance? You have the extraordinary privilege right now of having my undivided attention; usually I would be working on something in the background and/or listening to my web-radio station and perhaps have another chat going at the same time. And, of course, I’d be looking out the window a lot!

Your work seems a bit dreamlike to me in that is doesn’t make logical sense at first, but has a dreamlike logic that’s consistent within its own world.

Yes. That’s certainly a great compliment, and something I very much like to achieve, to create a dreamlike world, as this is also how much of my work is made. Very often I follow my gut feeling, although there is a tremendous amount of thinking and theorising involved as well.

What’s next for you, artistically?

I admit that I have pretty much said goodbye to theatre, as it were. There has been a slow shift in my work – it’s mostly ‘art’ now I guess, lots of photographic work with strange twists, found footage from the net. I am obsessed with webcams! We did a project with the Waag Society in Amsterdam, together with three other artists. We wired up the city and installed connected devices to invite people to interact with each other over distance – not verbally, but by using objects. It’s about telepresence, really.

What do you mean by ‘telepresence’?

Well, I was involved with an earlier pilot project where we had two dinner parties going on at the same time in Canada and the Netherlands. This project was the work of Jeff Mann and Michelle Terran; I was just one of a handful of collaborators.

We linked the two parties using robotic devices, including glasses that would clink and a fish that could speak, wine that poured itself and also video that got projected onto the head of the table so that it looked as if the Canadian table was an extension of our table. It was a lot of fun and we found that interactions functioned on a very different level than when you just chat or wave into the camera. The Canadians were really quite there – they were present, or rather they were telepresent.

A lot of people, including myself, are really jaded with the Internet right now:  too much spam, too much bad porn, too much advertising clogging it up…

Wow, that’s really sad that you say that!

Can new media once again have the power to excite people, to give them that kind of hope that happened when the Internet first hit?

I certainly feel tremendous excitement; always have done and always will! The big thing, of course, is the potential in the marriage of mobile phones with the Internet, something that’s happening now, something that many people don’t even realise is happening – when you download ringtones and send SMS messages, you are online! I strongly believe in the power of free speech, and the Internet – and the other new tools available – will make it possible for people to tell their own stories, even though, at the moment, it’s not available to nearly enough people. That’s one aspect of why I work with new media, I want to create tools through which we can speak and communicate, perhaps not even knowing that we are using high-tech tools.

…the End.