Abu Dhabi. Image from ‘Pillars of Wisdom’ (2009) by Paul Williams.

Paul Williams is stationed in Abu Dhabi doing contract work on computer systems. He has made a series of short films during his time there, which I find remarkable for their attempt to, in his words, ‘mix Ballardian landscapes with elements of Islamic mythology to arrive at something new and unfamiliar’. This film work is attuned to the subtle details and emergent urbanism at play in Abu Dhabi, which, like Dubai before it, is fast becoming the epitome of Ballardian spatial logic: an almost sentient, self-replicating landscape powered by the inexorable logic of capitalist realism. In such a place, tricks of perception are commonplace, enhanced not only by the preternatural, blasted desert light but also the strange stirrings of a future urban sensibility.

Below, find Paul’s latest two films, ‘Majlis al Jinn’ and the incredible ‘Vermilion Sands’, as well as another favourite of mine, ‘Solaris’, with its Lem/Tarkovsky references. I highly recommend exploring the rest of Paul’s output (often soundtracked by artists from the Touch soundscape label), which continue to mine this unique nexus of Ballard, Islam, rampant development, industrial isolation and subsonic hums. These filmic miniatures form a unique, ongoing travelogue, often shot from the upper-level hotel room high above the clouds that has served as Paul’s home for the past year, recording his nostalgia and emotion at the absence of his family in the UK, as he captures the evolution of the cityscape warping the desert below.

Note: these films are not viewable in Google Reader and other RSS devices due to embedding restrictions requested by the filmmaker.

Solaris from Paul H Williams on Vimeo.

Video and Music by Paul H Williams – Best experienced with headphones.

Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself.

Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

Abstracted, Mason invented some tale to satisfy her, then carried his coffee into the study and stared at the morning haze which lay across the rooftops, a soft lake of opacity that followed the same contours as the midnight sea. The mist dissolved in the sunlight, and for a moment the diminishing reality of the normal world reasserted itself, filling him with a poignant nostalgia.

JG Ballard, ‘Now Wakes the Sea’.

One morning I awoke to find everything obscured by a thick roiling mist. It seemed to have a life of its own; sometimes moving slowly sometimes quickly. I could smell the sea and I realised that that was where it had come from. I stood on the balcony with the clouds drifting about me. I thought of home and, for a while, it was as if I was floating between two worlds…

- Paul H Williams, 2010.

Majlis al Jinn (Meeting Place of the Jinn) from Paul H Williams on Vimeo.

Video and music by Paul H Williams
Filmed on location in Abu Dhabi
Best experienced with headphones

Genie (Arabic: جني jinnī, or djinni) is a supernatural creature in Pre-islamic and Islamic mythology which (according to both mythology) occupies a parallel world to that of mankind, and together with humans and angels makes up the three sentient creations of Allah. (1)

The Holy Qur’aan reveals that Jinn are created from fire whereas the human beings are created from clay. Although they are invisible to human eyes, the jinn can see us… (2)

I have always felt that the empty swimming pools and abandoned hotels featured in JG Ballard’s stories are symbols of loss and can be seen as “ghosts”. The empty structures shown here are in the process of being made and therefore have a very different relationship with time.

In this video I wanted to mix Ballardian landscapes with elements of Islamic mythology to arrive at something new and unfamiliar.

This is the reality of this part of the middle east: 21st century technologies combined with religious beliefs forged in the 7th century.

Majlis al Jinn takes place on a site that is between dream and waking; between conception and realisation. As it pushes its way into our reality perhaps we can already feel the presence of those beings who may eventually live there… human or other… it will depend upon who comes…

(1) en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Genie
(2) http://inter-islam.org/​faith/​jinn.html

- Paul H Williams, 2010.

Vermilion Sands from Paul H Williams on Vimeo.

Video and music by Paul H Williams
Filmed on location in Abu Dhabi
Best experienced with headphones

“Sometimes in the late afternoons we’d drive out along the beach to the Scented Desert and sit alone by one of the pools, watching the sun fall away behind the reefs and hills, lulling ourselves on the rose-sick air. When the wind began to blow cool across the sand we’d slip down into the water, bathe ourselves and drive back to town, filling the streets and café terraces with jasmine and musk-rose and helianthemum.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘Prima Belladona’.

“At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels, Bridgman stepped on to his balcony and looked out over the long stretches of cooling sand as the tides of purple shadow seeped across them. Slowly, extending their slender fingers through the shallow saddles and depressions, the shadows massed together like gigantic combs, a few phosphorescing spurs of obsidian isolated for a moment between the tines, and then finally coalesced and flooded in a solid wave across the half-submerged hotels. Behind the silent facades, in the tilting sand-filled streets which had once glittered with cocktail bars and restaurants, it was already night. Haloes of moonlight beaded the lamp-standards with silver dew, and draped the shuttered windows and slipping cornices like a frost of frozen gas.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’.

“May I have some water?”

I opened my eyes to find myself looking up at a tall figure standing over me. The voice was female but the silhouette, burned out by the intense, afternoon sunlight, was strangely androgynous. I was still drowsy. I’d come for a swim at the hotel’s small, artificial beach and, after half an hour of floating under the gaze of the semi-constructed skyscrapers on the neighbouring island, I’d returned to the shore for some food and a nap. The heat was relentless and I was sheltering beneath one of the thatched wooden sun shades planted deep in the soft white sand.

“Yes… yes… I must have drifted off,” I said to fill the vacuum while I located the bottle by the side of my sunlounger momentarily distracted by the lines of ants marching across the microscopic dunes.

When I looked back I realised I was in the company of a young woman. She seemed to be all arms and legs, very thin and angular. Her skin was deeply tanned and still dripping with water. Mirrored sunglasses obscured much of her small sharp face. As she raised the bottle to her lips a multitude of bangles slipped down her arm with a metallic rattle. I watched her drink for some time never having seen her amongst the regular group of hotel guests that I maintained my distance from with casual nods.

“That’s much better,” she said wiping her mouth with a satisfied gasp. “You like Ballard?” she nodded at the blanched copy of Vermilion Sands I had on the small, white plastic table next to me.

“Yes, I’m definitely a Ballardian,” I said smiling. I couldn’t place her accent. It seemed to veer from Russian into something much more eastern.

“Of course you know that Vermilion Sands actually exists,” she murmured.

There was a pause. Even the clanging of the workmen across the water constructing the new high-rise apartments seemed to fade for a few seconds.

“In our minds,” I said.

“A few hours drive from here,” she said ignoring my response. She let the idea slowly form inside my head. “Pen?” she demanded holding out her hand.

I fumbled in my rucksack wondering why I seemed to do whatever she said.

She started to sketch out a map on the pure white napkin that came with my lunch stopping occasionally to toss back her long black wet hair.

“That should get you there,” she said leaning back satisfied with her handiwork.

“Oh yes,” I looked at the map. “There it is Vermilion Sands…”

“You don’t believe me!” she laughed.

“I’m afraid not,” I laughed back. “Not even a little bit.”

She curled a forefinger at me to come closer. I leaned forward and so did she until our faces were just inches apart and I could smell the brine on her skin. She reached up to slowly move her mirrored shades down below the bridge of her nose. I looked into what should have been her eyes. Pale blue sea-anemones waved their delicate tendrils at me as if wafted by warm ocean currents from beneath a different sun.

I nodded my head.

She restored her sunglasses and stood up once more towering above me.

“Go and see,” she said over her shoulder as she returned to the gently lapping waves.

- Paul H Williams, 2010.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Dubai Ballard World

‘Like the suspended state of duty-free malls, a zone at once inside and yet outside the legal parameters of the country it exists in, Vaughan and [Crash's narrator] Ballard experience the motorways as weirdly detached from an embedded culture or history or morality’.

Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard.

From today’s news:

‘Japanese tourist Hiroshi Nohara is on a layover at the Mexico City airport. It has lasted almost three months, and he has no plans to leave…

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” he said through a visiting interpreter originally hired by a television station. “I don’t have a reason.”

The embassy can’t force him to leave, and since Nohara’s visa is valid all Mexican officials can do is wait for it to expire in early March. For reasons he can’t explain, Nohara has been in Terminal 1 of the Benito Juarez International Airport since September 2, surviving off donations from fast food restaurants and passengers and sleeping in a chair.’

Yes, I know precisely how he feels.

+ From Joanne:

You might want to take a look at the newest issue of Modern Painters (Feb 08.) There is an article about writers that inspire visual artists, and Ballard is mentioned several times. (“The reception of literature in the art world is partly a matter of adjectives: today any work that raises the topic of technology and catastrophe, for example, is automatically Ballardian.”)

Very intriguing. I’ll be expanding on the points raised in this article some time soon.

+ From Simon:

Drained swimming pools!

+ From melb psy:

I wondered if you’d seen this [girl films her attempted murder of her parents].

rather ‘Running Wild’….

+ From John:

Ran across this, ‘abandoned wonders of the former Soviet Union’, and thought it would interest you (if you haven’t already seen it).

+ From Alan:

I thought you might find this of some interest/use! Tis a pity it’s too late for your site, but they have, if you’ll excuse the pun, more in the pipeline!!! Great site by the way.

Toilet duct and other diminutive issues
January 23rd, 2008

Resonance FM’s Amenity Space is the only regular series on British radio dedicated to architecture, in this week’s edition Nicky Kirk and Tony Broomhead examine the acoustic spaces of toilets, ventilation shafts and other utilitarian spaces in some of London’s most well known public spaces. In next week’s edition Kirk and Broomhead discuss micro-architecture and look at some of the smallest projects making the biggest headlines in a show that will no doubt be of gargantuan quality.

Amenity Space broadcasts every Thursday between 1 and 2pm.

+ From Andy:

I linked your site from an article I did for Shanghaiist.com [about Rick McGrath's recent trip to Ballard's old home in Shanghai]. It’s only a digest style post but just letting you know all the same.

+ From Anonymous:

Ballard-related exhibition in Barcelona.

Note: I will be writing more about this when the time comes, ie, June/July this year; I’ve already written something about the event, speculating on the shape of it, some time ago.

+ From Darin:

I write to offer you a link to the current issue of an e-zine I edit. While not specifically “Ballardian,” the latest issue, “Dietrologia” of Farrago’s Wainscot features fiction that touches on themes that I think you might find worthwhile. I first heard of your site when you reviewed/blurbed the first issue of Diet Soap, in which my story “The Basement, Borges” appeared.

Urls: http://www.farragoswainscot.com
[current issue]: http://www.farragoswainscot.com/current.html

+ From Greg:

Extreme Ballardian tourism — The Island of Prora:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prora
http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=563
http://www.inst.at/trans/15Nr/10_5/rostock15.htm

Did Hitler invent mass tourism…?

+ From JD:

Hi, not sure whether this would interest you, but a guy called Paul Torrens has a project for modeling urban panic.

Some quotes . . .

“the project will develop simulations to explore avenues of sustainability in downtown settings, such as how cities can promote walking as an alternative to driving, and how pedestrian flow can be better integrated with transit-oriented development.”

“4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death;5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d’état — regime change through landscape architecture.”

Link:
http://pruned.blogspot.com/2007/06/modeling-urban-panic.html

P.S. Loving Ballardian.com BTW.

+ From Mr. Nobody:

Sex Offenders Set Up Camp

+ From Joe:

Simon, there’s a terrific video of JGB at home giving a kind of ‘greatest hits’ performance for the Italian publishers of Millenium People. I don’t think you have a link to it on the website, if you’re interested it can be found here.

Keep up the fine work, Ballardian.com is truly the website the great man deserves.

+ From Anonymous:

Greetings, Mr Sellars

If I may, Phantom Shanghai, an exquisite book of photography by Greg Girard. China’s hyper-economy is eerily represented by a ravenous building boom which is literally devouring all traces of the old. These new buildings loom threatening over what little is left, as if deliberating upon their next move towards total domination. William Gibson offers a brief introduction.

An interview with Girard is here.

Love The Ballardian!

+ From electric:

Black Friday Die Die Die: America’s most obscene shopping day meets its doom in an oily nightmare hell. All true!

+ From Peter:

Something from Ballard’s “The Subliminal Man” has begun to come true.

+ From Thomas:

cockroaches–first creatures conceived and born in space

+ From Mark:

Audi TT, and a model, in a swimming pool for a fashion photo shoot

Like the car wash scene from Crash, but wetter.

+ From Henry:

‘Letter bomber who bore a grudge’: The fightback begins.

‘You call this a nation?’ Approaching Sealand (photo: Simon Sellars).

While we’re on the subject of interstitial architecture, the concept of micronations could be said to be an example, especially when old, forgotten and disused structures slip through the cracks of nationalism. Sealand, a WWII gun platform in the North Sea, is perhaps the most (in)famous micronation and I had the unsettling experience of visiting it in May this year.

I wrote a travel piece on my journey for the Australian newspaper a few weeks back and that’s now appeared online. My photos weren’t used, so I’ve reproduced a couple below.

I’ve been developing a Ballardian perspective on micronations for some time now, delivering a paper at the Ballard conference in East Anglia earlier this year that made tentative steps towards exploring the connection. The paper was directly inspired by the answers I gave to Geoff Manaugh when he interviewed me over at BLDGBLOG last year, a conversation discussing the 2006 Lonely Planet micronations book I was involved in. Geoff’s last question to me was ‘How does this work intersect with your interest in J.G. Ballard?’, and that’s what kicked it all off, really.

I’ve refrained from posting too much on Ballardian.com about this area of interest, as I’m waiting to find out if my paper is being accepted for print publication. Once I know either way, I’ll be able to: post the paper here if not, or drum up a different version if yes.

Me on board Sealand (photo: Simon Sellars).

Sealand crew (photo: Simon Sellars).

..:: MORE INFO
+ Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations
+ Geoff’s BLDGBLOG interview with me
+ My travel piece, ‘Sealand: On the Heap’, published in the Australian newspaper, and reproduced online

‘Tourism is the great soporific. It’s a huge confidence trick, and gives people the dangerous idea that there’s something interesting in their lives. It’s musical chairs in reverse. Every time the muzak stops people stand up and dance around the world, and more chairs are added to the circle, more marinas and Marriott hotels, so everyone thinks they’re winning.’

‘But it’s another con?’

‘Complete. Today’s tourist goes nowhere. … All the upgrades in existence lead to the same airports and resort hotels, the same pina colada bullshit. … Travel is the last fantasy the 20th Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.’

‘And that can’t be done?’

‘There’s nowhere to go. The planet is full. You might as well stay at home and spend the money on chocolate fudge.’

———————————————————-
J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.
———————————————————-

LEFT: Photo: Simon Sellars. Walking past STA Travel in Collingwood (Melbourne), I was struck by this advertisement: ‘I was mugged in Mexico.’ STA targets the thrillseeking youngish backpacker scene, and it seems to have finally realised the futility of promoting Mexico via the standard travel-industry imagery of tacos, burritos and tequilas to a street-smart, apparently narcissistic audience that has seen it all and done it all before. The logical next step: marketing its target group’s nightmares.

Mass tourism accelerates the shrinking-globe effect. The spidery net of information technology means forward planning is negligible and the time between decision and departure minimal. Dirt-cheap air fares wrap the planet in a grid of many-tentacled route maps, itineraries and carbon trails. The romantic notion of ‘untouched areas’ becomes extinct due to countless package tourists blithely following guidebook trails laid out in advance, and the cumulative effect is that we have reached a stage in which anything and everything is able to be seen and experienced simultaneously, an ‘accident of reality’, after Paul Virilio.

When asked ‘But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?’, Virilio replied ‘We’ll dream of being blind’. But to follow the Ballardian line of sight means the only place left to visit when the world has been stripmined of experience is the inside of your skull — and your deepest, darkest fears.

Next in the series: ‘I was bashed and left for dead by a pack of rabid alpha males high on ice in the Melbourne CBD.’

For a target group brought up on Eli Roth films, that would sure beat the taco-and-tequila-style cliches of ‘Melbourne: World’s Most Livable City’.

Here’s a quote:

Perreau: You once said “Nothing has any sense except in terms of ephemeral airplane culture”. Motorways, airplanes, shopping centres… What is the link between these things? What do humans do?

Ballard: They take planes and fly around, like the great soaring birds who endlessly cross and recross the ocean. Like the albatross, we are looking for our soul. Tourism is a rehearsal for death.

Above: the Ballard family’s former house, now lit up in the colours of capitalism. Photo: Rick McGrath.

“Do you believe in synchronicity?” Andy asked. “That’s the 10 o’clock signal for today’s national anniversary. Sirens are blowing all over the country right now.” He leaned in, conspiratorially. “It was precisely 70 years ago today the Japanese attacked China and bombed the crap outta Shanghai. Tuesday, September 18, 1937. The beginning of the end for everyone living around here. And Jim’s childhood.”

I was dumbfounded. No, gobsmacked. What were the odds of this happening on the one day I was here? It was like some temporal shift was taking place, and I was being swept along in a sort of dual timeline. The walls were coming together to form an angle.

Aircraft had always interested Jim, and especially the Japanese bombers that had devastated the Nantao and Hongkew districts of Shanghai in 1937. Street after street of Chinese tenements had been leveled to the dust, and in the Avenue Edward VII a single bomb had killed a thousand people, more than any other bomb in the history of warfare.

Rick McGrath has onlined the travelogue detailing his visit to J.G. Ballard’s former home in Shanghai, the sovereign domestic zone that played host to a number of resonant scenes in Empire of the Sun.

In 2006, using Google maps and good old snail mail, McGrath nailed the location. Later, I received an email from Andy Best in Shanghai: “Did you know Ballard’s former house is now a restaurant?” Knowing of Rick’s obsession, I forwarded it on. Rick was in touch with Andy, and then Rick was gone.

Arriving in Shanghai, Andy is his guide. They eat at Ballard’s house. The restaurant’s proprietor gets interested in a potential tie-in with the building’s unique history. They explore ‘other sites of Ballardian temporal archaeology’, including Lunghua Civilian Assembly Camp (now Shanghai High School), where Ballard and his family were interned.

The journey is surreal. Ballard freefalls in (non)space. The experience of Shanghai and Shepperton colours everything Ballard writes, or at least, everything he writes colours Ballard’s experience of Shanghai and Shepperton. Geographic boundaries dissolve in a mesh of psycho-spatial coordinates. But now, Rick McGrath is in the perfect position to weave a scale cartography of the inside of J.G. Ballard’s head.

First phase: ‘doorstepping’ JGB in Shepperton earlier this year. Second phase: Shanghai Central.

..:: MORE

+ Chris Mitchell, of jgballard.com, has an appreciative appraisal of Rick’s Shanghai trip from a travel writer’s perspective at his other site, Travel Happy.
+ Compare Rick’s photos of the house and its innards with Ballard’s own return to Shanghai, as documented in Shanghai Jim.