Ballardian

Tacita Dean’s new film, JG, is currently on view at the Arcadia University Art Gallery. JG is inspired by Dean’s correspondence with J.G. Ballard, and explores connections between his short story ‘The Voices of Time’ and Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork and film Spiral Jetty. To celebrate Dean’s new work, Andrew Frost explores the enduring and mysterious relationship between Ballard, Smithson and Dean.

There’s a brief Ballard mention in my latest photo-essay, ‘Postcards from the Edgelands (for Marion Shoard)’, originally published in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, Katrina Stoll & Scott Lloyd (eds), Berlin: Jovis, 2010. The essay uses the work of one of my main influences, the environmentalist Marion Shoard, and her research into the ‘edgelands’ (‘the interfacial interzone between urban and rural’), in order to address Infrastructure as Architecture’s main enquiry: is the involvement of architects necessary to shape the development of infrastructural design?

Ballardian.com presents selections taken from artist Simon O’Carrigan’s mixed-media series “The Drowned World”, a title taken in reference to a speculative fiction that inspired much of the imagery in this work: J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.

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.

Solveig Nordlund’s Ballard adaptation, Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, is rooted in reality, as this report on Spain’s ghost towns demonstrates.

Rick McGrath interviews Solveig Nordlund about her feature film, Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (2002). Based on JGB’s short story, ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, it’s arguably the best Ballard adaptation of them all, although it has rarely been shown outside Portugal. Included with the interview are clips from the film as well as from Solveig’s previous Ballard adaptation, ‘Journey to Orion’ (based on ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’).

Jamie Sherry reviews a unique on-screen adaptation of Ballard’s work, now showing on BallardoTube: the Italian animation, Grande Anarca, based on JGB’s 1985 short story, ‘Answers to A Questionnaire’. Can the filmmakers succeed where other, big-name suitors have failed — decanting Ballard’s experimental literary narratives into a more linear cinematic language? Or does Ballard resist classification yet again?

This short piece about Ballardian sound art appeared in the CCCB’s catalogue for their Ballard exhibition. Accompanying this post is a 12-track muxtape featuring selections from the music curated for the event.

Mike Holliday investigates a strange interregnum in Ballard’s career, three short stories that return to earlier concerns: psychological dislocations and disturbances, somehow caused by human space-flight, in our perception of the flow of time.

Drained swimming pools are a staple in Ballard’s work, and also the subject of photographer Gigi Cifali’s latest series.

Film and media studio floods London 82 years hence, evokes Ballard.

Troy Paiva’s desert photography evokes the crumbling, decadent resorts and enervated cityscapes of Ballard’s Vermilion Sands and Hello America stories. Enjoy this interview with Troy, the Light-Painter of Mojave D.

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

Will Self was recently interviewed on BBC Radio 4 by Mariella Frostrup about his admiration for J.G. Ballard’s work. Here’s a transcript of that interview.

Dan O’Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a German mixed-media radio play based on High-Rise. Transposing the novel to Berlin in 2013, it references Nazism, notably Speer’s social engineering through architecture, on its way to exploring Ballard’s relevance to speculative models of German life.

According to William Viney, Crash presents a barrage of images that expresses collapse, dereliction, and waste; a seemingly endless carnival of sex and destruction; intoxicating, perverting, and desensitizing the reader, while Empire of the Sun can be seen as the terminus of Ballard’s treatment of waste, the epitome of all that has gone before. Although Ballard’s other works deal with the subject of death and the disposal of corpses, Empire of the Sun attempts to cope with this disposal on a mass-scale, or rather, during both war and peace, it explores the complex transition between the valued human being and lifeless, disposable cadaver.

William Viney explores how High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City” contain familiar visual landscapes. However, each of these recognisable aspects of urban experience is rendered unfamiliar through the pervasive renegotiation of waste categories.

Above: ‘The Staircase’, by Troy Paiva, 2005. ‘Byron Hot Springs Hotel, Byron California. Built in the 1930s, used for POW interrogations during WWII. Abandoned for decades, many say it’s quite haunted. It IS noisy at night in there . . . Night,full moon, dark interior, blue and red-gelled strobe flash. Canon 20D.’ The brilliant work [...]

The basic tenet in Dominika Oramus’ new book on Ballard is that since the end of World War II western civilization has been merrily racing down the Highway to Hell in a white Pontiac; and all the evidence you need is in the fiction of J.G. Ballard.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Self-portrait: next to the M3 in Shepperton (photo: Simon Sellars). Apologies for the down time this site has experienced since the Ballard conference. I’m still in England where I’ve experienced many Ballardian and sub-Ballardian moments (and even some non-Ballardian moments, would you Adam and Eve it?) including exchanging views on ‘torture porn’ with Rick Poynor [...]

Flyer for Northern Void. Last night I attended the second (and last, for now) screening of Philip Brophy’s 50-minute film Northern Void, billed as a “live cinema performance” accompanied by the real-time sonics of Ph2 (Brophy and Philip Samartzis). Northern Void is set along Plenty Rd, in the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston — specifically [...]

Check out these flood maps — dynamic maps predicting sea-level rise around the globe (found via Dissensus). First, adjust the rising sea level to +14m. Then focus on London. Now zoom into Shepperton. Result: a self-fulfilling prophecy for the Shepperton-based author of The Drowned World.

OPENING LINE: “The dust came first.” From the Penguin edition, 1976: The wind came from nowhere … a super-hurricane that blasted round the globe at hundreds of miles per hour burying whole communities beneath piles of rubble, destroying all organized life and driving those it did not kill to seek safety in tunnels and sewers [...]

OPENING LINE: “Soon it would be too hot.” From Amazon UK: In the 21st century, fluctuations in solar radiation have caused the ice-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilization has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to [...]

OPENING LINE: “At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating [...]

OPENING LINE: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” From the opening scene of Laing tucking into his canine dinner — the spoils of urban warfare — to the final [...]

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: “A small revolution was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed.” From the 2003 Flamingo edition: Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like another [...]

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 [...]

Geoff has posted Part 2 of his Mike Davis interview over at BLDGBLOG, with suitably Ballardian and peripheral topics: “In this instalment, Davis discusses the rise of Pentecostalism in global mega-slums; the threat of avian flu; the disease vectors of urban poverty; criminal and terrorist mini-states; the future of sovereignty; environmental footprints; William Gibson; the [...]

Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh has posted a terrific interview with Mike Davis, the man JGB dubbed “the prose laureate of America’s decline”. From BLDGBLOG: ‘I first discovered Mike Davis’s work about a decade ago, through his book City of Quartz, a detailed and poetic look at the social geography of Los Angeles. Perhaps most [...]

Reading this article my mind went all Ballardian. Giant patch of ocean debris carries ghost nets, trash onto Island shores By Jan TenBruggencate Advertiser Science Writer A massive oceanic debris gyre has drifted south into Hawaiian waters, driving loads of derelict fishing gear and plastic trash onto Island beaches. For Hawai’i beachcombers, it means better [...]

LitLine, a ‘website for the Independant Literary Community’, has published its list of the 100 Best First Lines from Novels. Coming in at No. 1 is “Call me Ishmael” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851). Then, at No. 81 they have “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash” (J. G. Ballard, Crash, 1973). A fine [...]

Whale spotted in central London A seven-tonne whale has made its way up the Thames to central London, where it is being watched by riverside crowds. The northern bottle-nosed whale, which is 16-18ft long and is usually found in deep sea waters, has passed Parliament and is moving upstream. A rescue boat has been sent [...]

An excerpt from Peter Carty’s Ballard-referencing review of an interesting-sounding novel… “An Everyman’s life history doomed to repeat itself as farce” Remainder, By Tom McCarthy Published: 12 December 2005 “Re-enactment has been a feature in recent art, most famously in Jeremy Deller’s reprise of the Orgreave battle between striking miners and police. It is a [...]

Over at Yahoo’s JG Ballard newsgroup, Ballard scholar Umberto Rossi posted, in his words, “part of a poem called the Ruin, which describes the remains of a Roman city in England… probably Acquae Sulis, which the barbarians call Bath today. It came to my mind that the haunted and haunting description of ruins which were [...]

Bruce Sterling is a prolific science-fiction writer, futurist, social critic and design professor, best known for his bestselling novels and seminal short fiction, and as the editor of the Mirrorshades anthology that defined the ‘cyberpunk’ subgenre. His nonfiction includes works of futurism such as Tomorrow Now; a regular column and blog for Wired; and his [...]

This one has it all — submerged flyovers, apartment dwellers fighting their way to the top floors, oil tankers deposited miles inland like drowned giants, refugee colonies in the 1970s sports arena, urban citizens reduced to Hobbesian looters overnight — too bad it’s nonfiction.

From the Capri Films website: TITLE: HIGH-RISE (Feature Film – in Development) SYNOPSIS: From J.G. Ballard, the author of the best sellers, COCAINE NIGHTS and EMPIRE OF THE SUN, comes an unsettling and unforgettable tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control. The tower’s affluent tenants are bent on an orgy [...]

Ballard-referencing article on the gentrification/renaissance of high rises.