Photograph by Simon Sellars.

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?

In the edgelands, past, present and future collide. Shoard points out that electricity pylons, among the edgelands’ most recognisable symbols, were not conceived of when most settlements were founded. Later, they were dumped on the edge, as close as can be to the city, where they mingle with the essential services that grew with the settlement itself, such as mills and excavation sites. The edgelands therefore offer a privileged glimpse at ‘history as in the stratified layers of an archaeological site’, and even of the future. For Shoard, this archaeological element is worth preserving. She even proposes guided historical walking tours that take in the edgelands, giving people an insight into how society actually functions through the interlocking grid of infrastructure. The Sikh community, similarly dumped at the edge, points towards a potentially vital contributor to the new Australian economy waiting in the wings for acceptance and admittance into the centre. Even the signifiers of porn culture in the edgelands serve as signposts to the future, as the writer J.G. Ballard reminds us: ‘A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction’.

The edgelands are where the future waits to happen.

Simon Sellars, ‘Postcards from the Edgelands (for Marion Shoard)’.

Postcards from the Edgelands (for Marion Shoard) was originally published in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, Katrina Stoll & Scott Lloyd (eds), Berlin: Jovis, 2010.

Infrastructure has played a key role in dramatically reformatting the built fabric and spatial reserves within the past one hundred years, and will continue to do so in the future. The involvement of architects is necessary to shape the development of infrastructural design.

Infrastructure as Architecture contains a selection of influential architects and writers who have critically evaluated the coupling of these fields through essays and projects. The book is structured by five organizing themes that frame the diverse approaches to the subject, namely: Infrastructure Economy, Infrastructure Ecology, Infrastructure Culture, Infrastructure Politics, and Infrastructure Space/Networks.

Sample PDF from Jovis.

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “The Drowned World”. 2007. Digital montage. Dimensions variable.

Selections taken from Simon O’Carrigan’s body of work “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.

ARTIST STATEMENT

[Note: the quotes throughout, from Ballard's The Drowned World, were not included in the artist's original presentation -- SS].

“The Drowned World” is a body of work focussed on the making of images. Coming from a painterly approach to the construction of images, parallels are drawn between the layered nature of the oil paint medium, and the layering prevalent in digital imaging software. The premise of a fragmented nature of vision in a ‘deluge’ of visual culture leads to an image in tension: striving for the unity of traditional modes of painting but simultaneously embracing the fissures and tears embodied in the construction of the image. The flood became the keystone of the work’s subject matter in relation to several concerns: climate change, mythical creation floods, apocalyptic forecasts, inspiration taken from J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World, and a certain atmosphere of unstoppable movement (a parallel with digital and wireless technologies).

Formally, the flood holds a unique form of surface: a surface that can shift and create unexpected combinations (by literally displacing debris, also by the nature of reflection on the surface). This surface that is temporary, mobile, and fragmented translates to the surface of the painted works. Many images in the body of work are sourced from photographs both found and newly made. The flat surface and particular characteristics of different kinds of lenses, cameras, and printing technologies are closely observed in the reworking of each image. Thus, some images sourced from 1970s National Geographic magazines have a slightly less saturated colour and a more grainy image than those taken in 2007 on a digital SLR and printed with advanced digital technologies.

The combination of the image fragments is often firstly a digital process, but always mimicking traditional knife-and-glue collage. In this way, the digital production uses the trompe l’oeil mode of painting. This is extended by the literal use of trompe l’oeil in some of the works, and the addition of neatly ‘cut’ projected video to act as another layer of montage, as if the projected light could be cut and glued into place.

Simon O’Carrigan. Iguana (from The Drowned World). 2008. Mixed media cel animation. 15 sec.

All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly… Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time board-rooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

The body of work depicts the flood both as peaceful, cleansing bodies of water and as destructive, apocalyptic events. The apocalypse figures in the final body of work only as an allusion or a hidden layer of meaning, though the research focussed largely on this apocalypse as a parallel of the ‘Death of Painting’. The ‘Death of Painting’ was prefigured by photography’s invention, and then more directly by the expansion of artistic practice to include found objects, installations and performances. In “The Drowned World”, the aim was to answer the question not of painting’s vitality (a question which is often asked, but to my mind misses the point) but of its ontology. Like any art form, painting can never completely die, but its modality can change and evolve.

Digital imaging and its collusion with marketing and consumer culture have greatly changed the methods and significance of image construction, and image transmission. This shift in visual culture is arguably as significant for painting as the invention of photography was: at a time when fewer artists work with images (choosing rather to focus on conceptual works, performance, or time-based mediums), the creation of visual representations are left to open for commerce to dominate. It is my feeling that those of us who choose still to paint, and to do so in a representational manner, have a responsibility to take the images back, and to investigate the ramifications of the changing modes of image construction and consumption.

Parts of my research focussed on a handful of texts – Rosalind Krauss and subsequent commentary on the ‘expanded field’ of arts practice, and Jacques Lacan on visuality and subjectivity. These lines of inquiry are not central to the finished work, nor need the audience even be aware of them, though they were central in focussing and clarifying what was being achieved in the work. The ‘expanded field’ discourse speaks of a ‘technical support’ as replacing the traditional medium – in this case, all the works may become resolved as oil on canvas, but the production method is a combination of traditional and digital ideas (composition, layering, colour theory, blue-screen and matting effects). The works that combine projection and painting most obviously fit this schema, though all the works shared a focus not on the materiality of one particular medium, but on the crossing points between different ways of working.

Simon O’Carrigan. Burnley Hotel (from The Drowned World). 2008. Mixed Media, stopmotion, & digital. 1 min 37 sec.

…this morning he found himself reluctant to leave the cool, air-curtained haven of the hotel suite. He had spent a couple of hours over breakfast alone, and then completed a six-page entry in his diary, deliberately delaying his departure until Colonel Riggs passed the hotel in his patrol boat, knowing that by then it would be too late to go to the station.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Lacan’s notion of visuality and ‘geometral perspective’ clarified for me the reality of fragmented perception and questions the truth of the image. Just as much, it questions the truth of sight and the reliance on light. The projector inverts the usual working of viewing a painting, projecting out and onto rather then looking and ‘taking in’. The layers of imagery and the surface of the flood (or canvas) came for me to symbolise Lacan’s Imaginary, Real and Symbolic; the final painting taking the position of the Lacanian image-screen which shields the subject from reality. In this way, the works function as the tuché (the missed encounter with the Real) – a seemingly obvious parallel to the eking out of lives forever barraged by images which shelter us from objectively or literally experiencing their depicted events.

Finally, the notion of nachtraglichkeit (deferred action) taken from Sigmund Freud engages with a kind of deferred conclusion. Most explicitly referenced in the work Deferred Rapture, I took this notion of deferral to relate to a post- poned Apocalypse. I developed a sense of the ‘punctuational apocalypse’ – meaning that as a period at the end of the sentence, the Apocalypse gives meaning to what has come before. In this way, the end of painting, whether it eventually arrives as a final judgement or just as another deferral along the way, pushes forward the painter to create images of depth and significance as much as possible. The images finally displayed for assessment read quite clearly as images aimed at unity, aimed at a sense of the sublime, but falling short – rendered out of fragments plucked from the deluge, there is an impossibility of ever completing that perfect image, and possibly of ever recovering the sought after depth and significance of the image.

Simon O’Carrigan.

Simon O’Carrigan. Final Days. 2006. Oil on canvas. 120 x 160 cm.

Was the drowned world itself, and the mysterious quest for the south which had possessed Hardman, no more than an impulse to suicide, an unconscious acceptance of the logic of his own devolutionary descent, the ultimate neuronic synthesis of the archaeopsychic zero?

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Louisian Ha Long (3121). 2007. Oil & mixed media on canvas. 80 x 60 cm.

The Mediterranean contracted into a system of inland lakes, the British Isles was linked again with northern France. The Middle West of the United States, filled by the Mississippi as it drained the Rocky Mountains, became an enormous gulf opening into the Hudson Bay, while the Caribbean Sea was transformed into a desert of silt and salt flats. Europe became a system of giant lagoons, centred on the principal low-lying cities, inundated by the silt carried southwards by the expanding rivers.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Surfacing (Cataract). 2007. Oil on canvas & acetate. 76 x 51 cm.

The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Acid Lake (Tidal Fold). 2007. Oil on canvas. 60 x 101 cm (two panels).

Many of the smaller lakes were now filled by the silt, yellow discs of fungus-covered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. After the Deluge (First Light Over Neo Atlantis). 2007. Oil on canvas & foamcore. 91 x 122 cm.

When the first of the storm-belts moved off the visibility cleared, and he could see the southern edge of the sea, a line of tremendous silt banks over a hundred yards in height. In the spasmodic sunlight they glittered along the horizon like fields of gold, the tops of the jungle beyond rising above them.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Ef(fusion). 2007. Oil on canvas, digital lambda print, foamcore. 66 x 75 cm.

Only fifty miles to the south, the rain-clouds were packed together in tight layers, blotting out the swamps and archipelagos of the horizon. Obscured by the events of the past week, the archaic sun in his mind beat again continuously with its immense power, its identity merging now with that of the real sun visible behind the rain clouds. Relentless and magnetic, it called him southward, to the great heat and submerged lagoons of the Equator.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Rip/Current (We’ll Burn That Bridge When We Come To It). 2007. Oil on canvas. 61 x 61 cm.

Huge pools of water still lay about everywhere, leaking from the ground floors of the buildings, but they were little more than two or three feet deep. There were clear stretches of pavement over a hundred yards long, and many of the further streets were completely drained. Dying fish and marine plants expired in the centre of the roadways, and huge banks of black sludge were silted up into the gutters and over the sidewalks, but fortunately the escaping waters had cut long pathways through them.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Please Dump Garbage. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 40 x 60 cm.

As the sun rose over the lagoon, driving clouds of steam into the great golden pall, Kerans felt the terrible stench of the water-line, the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcasses. Huge flies spun by, bouncing off the wire cage of the cutter, and giant bats raced across the heating water towards their eyries in the ruined buildings. Beautiful and serene from his balcony a few minutes earlier, Kerans realized that the lagoon was nothing more than a garbage-filled swamp.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Rain Dogs. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 60 x 40 cm.

With the reappearance of the submerged streets and buildings his entire manner had changed abruptly. All traces of courtly refinement and laconic humour had vanished; he was now callous and vulpine, the renegade spirit of the hoodlum streets returning to his lost playground. It was almost as if the presence of the water had anaesthetized him, smothering his true character so that only the surface veneer of charm and moodiness remained.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Alter-Piece (Flow). 2007. Oil on canvas & acetate, projected video. Dimensions variable, 51 x 64 cm.

Down the side-streets they could see the great viscous mass lifting over the rooftops, flowing through the gutted buildings… Here and there the perimeter of the dyke moored itself to a heavier obstruction – a church or government office – and diverged from its circular path around the lagoon.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Fissure (Under the Weather Projection). 2007. Oil on canvas, projected video. Dimensions variable (120 x 120 cm).

‘Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me of the drowned world of my uterine childhood – if so, the best thing is to leave straight away. Everything Riggs says is true. There’s little hope of standing up to the
rainstorms and the malaria’.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 30 x 60 cm.

Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o’clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon #2. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 60 x 40 cm.

Many of the lagoons in the centre of the city were surrounded by an intact ring of buildings, and consequently little silt had entered them. Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargaso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “Lagoon”. 2008. Mixed media on paper. 15 x 20 cm.

Behind the building was an enormous bank of silt, reaching upwards out of the surrounding swamp to the railings of the terrace, on to which spilled a luxurious outcrop of vegetation. Ducking below the broad fronds of the fern-trees, he raced along to the barrage, fitted between the end of the building and the shoulder of the adjacent office block. Apart from the exit creek on the far side of the lagoon where the pumping scows had been stationed, this was the only major entry point for the water that had passed into the lagoon.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “Lagoon”. 2008. Mixed media on paper. 15 x 20 cm.

With a dull rumbling roar of collapsing buildings, the sea poured in full flood.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “Lagoon”. 2008. Mixed media on paper. 20 x 15 cm.

Too many of the other buildings around the lagoon had long since slipped and slid away below the silt, revealing their gimcrack origins, and the Ritz now stood in splendid isolation on the west shore, even the rich blue moulds sprouting from the carpets in the dark corridors adding to its 19th-century dignity.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon (from The Drowned World). 2008. Paper cut out & oil on acetate. 12 sec.

Slowly the interval of water widened to a hundred and then two hundred yards, and he reached the first of the small islands that grew out of the swamp on the roofs of isolated buildings. Hidden by them, he sat up and reefed
the sail, then looked back for the last time at the perimeter of the lagoon.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

+ More info: Simon O’Carrigan

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ “Ambiguous aims”: a review of Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard [NSFW]
+ The Office Park
+ Ann Lislegaard: ‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’
+ Drowned London
+ Flooded London
+ ‘Paradigm of nowhere’: Shepperton, a photo essay
+ J.G. Ballard: the Visual Tribute
+ Jon Cattapan’s Drowned World
+ Future Ruins

Images by Michelle Lord, from Future Ruins (inspired by JG Ballard’s ‘The Ultimate City’), 2008.

‘Pulled apart by the elders, many of the sets revealed their internal wiring. The green and yellow circuitry, the blue capacitors and modulators, mingled with the bright berries of the firethorn, rival orders of a wayward nature merging again after millions of years of separate evolution.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009, pp. 82-7.

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.

In JG Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’,[1] the sonic strata of everyday urban life – a ‘frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines’[2] – is so without respite that it is literally embedded within walls and surfaces and must be vacuumed away with a device called the ‘sonovac’. The central character, Mangon, is a mute who has developed hyperacute hearing, making him a valued sound- sweep. His main client is Madame Gioconda, an ex-opera singer whose career ended with the advent of ‘ultrasonic music’. Ultrasonic producers electronically rescore classical symphonies into musical notation that operates on a subliminal level, making use of the sensorium beyond the normal range of the human ear. Supposedly the new music, ostensibly silent, has richer texture, theme and emotion, but whether this is merely a placebo effect to placate the frazzled masses remains ambiguous.

Mangon strives to resurrect Gioconda’s career, but when he does eventually stage her comeback, she botches it, her voice so cracked, out of practice and out of tune that it causes great distress to all who hear it. The story ends with Mangon driving off in his sound truck as he turns on the vehicle’s inbuilt sonovac – filled with the city’s sonic detritus – to drown out Gioconda singing like an ‘insane banshee’. Effectively, Mangon manipulates the sounds of the city to assuage his psychological turmoil.

Ballard’s story anticipates R Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape project, which aimed to reduce the noise pollution of industrial environments in favour of an ‘acoustic ecology’, eliminating so-called ‘bad’ sounds in favour of prescribed ‘good’ sounds, returning to ‘the Ursound’ supposedly found in nature, where, Schafer rhapsodises, ‘listening blindly to our ancestors and the wild creatures, we will feel it surge within us again, in our speaking and in our music’.[3] But as Geoff Manaugh notes: ‘Where the Project went wrong … was when it thought it had a kind of sonic monopoly over what sounded good. Industrial noises would be scrubbed from the city … and a nostalgic calm … infused in its place. Think church bells, not automobiles. But where would such sensory cleansing leave those … who enjoy the sounds of factories?’[4]

‘Halloway had the distinct impression that this solitary young mute was a prisoner here, high above this museum of cars in the centre of the abandoned airport.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

For Ballard, too, neither full reliance on technology (represented by the sterile, calming aesthetic of ultrasonic music) nor the reactionary turn to nostalgia and a safe retreat into the past (ie Mangon’s initial deification of the opera singer) is posited as an adequate solution. Instead, a middle ground is sought, a strategy found throughout his career, grounded in the sense that the built environment must be met on its own terms.

In the novella ‘The Ultimate City’,[5] Ballard moves beyond Mangon’s half-aware thumbnail sketch and into a three-dimensionality: a full-scale cognitive remapping. A future ecotopia, Garden City, has developed wind power and alternative technologies after New York has fallen into ruins from the exhaustion of fossil fuels. The central character, Halloway, dissatisfied with what he sees as the dulling of the imagination in Garden City, with its organic conformity, makes his way back to the abandoned New York, where he attempts to restart the metropolis and its power supplies. Significantly, it is the noise of the city that he misses and that he is inescapably drawn to. With the help of Olds (another mute), Halloway manages to restart the generators and power supplies of a small sector of the city, bringing to life neon and traffic lights, while broadcasting sound- effects records of automobile and aircraft noise:

Halloway moved from one apartment to the next, flicking lights on and off, working the appliances in the kitchens. Mixers chattered, toasters and refrigerators hummed, warning lights glowed in control panels … Television sets came on, radios emitted a ghostly tonelessness interrupted now and then by static from the remote-controlled switching units of the tidal pumps twenty miles away.

It was only now, in this raucous light and noise, that the city was being its true self, only in this flood of cheap neon that it was really alive …[6]

Like Mangon, but on a grander scale, Halloway tunes the city rather than shutting it out, rejecting the sterile, affectless Garden City for a complete reimagining and re-envisaging of the city’s technological grid, including the acoustic footprint that so disturbed the inventors of ultrasonic music. This time, the story anticipates the Positive Soundscapes research project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and comprising five British universities, which aims to convince architects and town planners to think beyond the traditional focus on reducing noise levels and to pay attention instead to ‘the many possibilities for creating positive environments in the soundscapes in which we live. People can completely change their perception of a sound once they have identified it. In the laboratory, many listeners prefer distant motorway noise to rushing water, until they are told what the sounds are.’[7]

I have cited these examples of urban sound in Ballard because they represent the key components of a framework he uses to critique the psychological and perceptual dimensions that are saturated in the built environment, but that seem lacking in the discourse that generates architectural practice. In a sense, Ballard’s work is about nothing but the built environment. It is often said that technology and the liminal zones of suburbia and non- place urban fields are his main characters, and indeed the buildings and zones he erects – the motorway system in Crash,[8] the apartment block in High-Rise (‘an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence’),[9] the secessionist shopping centre in Kingdom Come[10] – all seem imbued with an artificial intelligence determined to eradicate human life as if it were a disease.

This is a gambit that brings sociologist Ron Smith’s observation into stark relief: ‘If you want to see what’s wrong with architecture today, pick up the latest issue of almost any architectural design magazine. They’re filled with pictures of interesting architecture, but you rarely see any people actually using those buildings.’[11] In Ballard, trends (and flaws) in architectural design are pursued to their logical extremes, and then bent backwards or forwards through time to go completely beyond logic. In the real world, people might complain about an escalator too far away from a baggage chute in an airport or a concourse in a mall that heats up too quickly, or overly processed floors that make far too much noise when walked upon. In Ballard, the unspoken tension and psychopathology engendered by such scenarios is recycled, reheated and allowed free rein to play itself out to the bitterest of ends.

‘Buckmaster tried to point out to Halloway how the Twentieth Century had met its self-made death. They stood on the shores of artificial lagoons filled with chemical wastes, drove along canals silvered by metallic scum, across landscapes covered by thousands of tons of untreated garbage, fields piled high with cans, broken glass and derelict machinery.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

In High-Rise, which charts the breakdown of the social order in a neo-Corbusian residential building, at first it is the little things that niggle. These then overlay and overlap, each new escalation of hostilities a clear and logical progression from the previous strata, however bizarre each incident might seem in isolation. Parents find that the building hasn’t been designed for children: there is no free, open space, only ‘someone else’s car park’. Shared garbage disposal causes anxiety and division between residents. Raucous parties occur on the upper floors, and residents in ‘better-sited apartments’ are unsympathetic to those living below them. Dog owners are attacked for allowing their pets to urinate and defecate in the elevators, culminating in the fateful moment when one resident’s Afghan hound is drowned in the swimming pool.

Thereafter, things really take off: incidents of violent aggression morph into tribal skirmishes and warring groups cut off escalator access, barricading their apartments and ‘Balkanising’ the middle section of flats to form a buffer zone. Yet, after the system has collapsed and failed, what we are left with is more than a mere glimmer of hope, and clearly akin to a programme of resistance based on emergent psychologies and a radical new approach to the built environment: ‘Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways.’[12]

Yet just as Positive Soundscapes has encountered resistance in persuading architects and engineers to re- evaluate environmental sound, ‘perhaps because of barriers to communication across different disciplines’[13], chances are you will not find Ballard on the syllabus. According to Nic Clear, who has used Ballard’s work as an aid in architectural learning: ‘Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for “popular” fiction – writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist – and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject.’[14]

Yet architects have no compunction about appropriating critical theory to their own ends. Peter Eisenman drew heavily on Deleuze and Baudrillard for his conception of ‘interstitial’ architecture and ‘blurred zones’, where the aim was to examine the way the virtual has invaded the actual, displacing architecture’s traditional role as an anchor for the real. Eisenman’s ‘philosophy lite’ sought to invite architecture to explore conceptual spaces located within the ‘folds’ of the built environment, with the aim of ‘refram[ing] existing urbanism, to set it off in a new direction’.[15] But surely the theory of Deleuze (which has more than a few correspondences with the work of Ballard) is designed to inspire affirmation in the reader, the user, the inhabitant; surely it must be tangible and must work in practice, in real-world terms, in that it must inspire thought and positive action to affirm its validity.

‘Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal- scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

That to me seems the Deleuzian ideal – the Ballardian ideal. It would seem apposite to say the majority of criticism of Eisenman’s buildings implies that not only are most users unaware of the inner workings of the ‘process of the interstitial’ that built the thing, but that in the final product antagonism and negation is placed before affirmation and interaction. As Roger Kimball writes: ‘When we encounter a stairway that leads nowhere … we need [Eisenman's] help to understand that we are being given a lesson in linguistic futility. Otherwise we might foolishly conclude that it was just a stairway that led nowhere and wonder about the sanity of the chap who paid the architect’s bill.’[16]

Ballard is interested in urbanism and spatial dynamics as a way to understand the city as narrative. The psychological dimension of urban life plays an important part, ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the city on a sensory level. He should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in making architecture more ‘user friendly’, or to anyone who thinks that architecture should be more than a series of shiny icons designed by remote starchitects. In this, he is ideally matched with the aims of Smith, who believes that ‘to become truly great architects [architecture students] also have to be great social psychologists, community sociologists, and organizational theorists’,[17] and also those of Michael Kroelinger, who teaches a course in ‘Architectural Sociology’ at the University of Nevada that ‘underscores the importance of understanding people’s values, needs, and attitudes, from an individual level to an organizational one’.[18]

Architects: read, study and learn from Ballard’s writing. Because it should not be the job of the architect to build worlds and indulge the luxury of allowing them to fail at our expense, but that of the writer, the constructor of virtual worlds that live, breathe and die in virtuality so that we, in the actual, do not have to expire to prove a point. Only then should we overlay the virtual with the actual to create a stereoscopic representation, a truly interstitial process that places the user at the centre with the power to inform, direct, stage and manage the terms of his or her movement through time and space, perhaps nudging us one step closer to a read/write city in which we are free to ‘tune’ the built environment, [19] free to contribute to the conditions of our cohabitation.

In fact, an interdisciplinary, specifically Ballardian approach may be exactly what is required to shake architecture out of its ‘business as usual’ mentality, forcing it to confront the global economic and environmental crises just over the horizon. Ask the question: is another ‘shiny, happy’ building really what we want or need to see or inhabit?

‘He knew now that he would never return to Garden City, with its pastoral calm … he would set off on foot, … following the memorials westwards across the continent, until he found the old man again and could help him raise his pyramids of washing machines, radiator-grilles and typewriters.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Notes
[1] JG Ballard, ‘The Sound-Sweep’ [1960], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[2] Ibid, p 106.
[3] Quoted in Brandon LaBelle, Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum (New York and London), 2006, p 204.
[4] Geoff Manaugh, ‘Audio Architecture’, BLDGBLOG, 10 August 2007. See http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/audio-architecture.html, accessed 26 January 2008.
[5] JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’ [1976], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[6] Ibid, pp 902, 907.
[7] Positive Soundscapes, ‘Project Overview’, Positive Soundscapes: A Re- evaluation of Environmental Sound. See www.positivesoundscapes.org/project_overview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash [1973], Vintage (London), 1995.
[9] JG Ballard, High-Rise [1975], Flamingo (London), 1993.
[10] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[11] Quoted in Gian Galassi, ‘Community by Design’, UNLV Magazine, Fall 2004. See http://magazine.unlv.edu/Issues/Fall04/community.html>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[12] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit, p 147.
[13] Positive Soundscapes, op cit.
[14] Simon Sellars, ‘Architectures of the Near Future: An Interview with Nic
Clear’, Ballardian, 24 December 2008. See www.ballardian.com/near-future-nic-clear- interview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[15] Peter Eisenman (ed), Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988–1998, Monacelli Press (New York), 2002, p 132.
[16] Roger Kimball, ‘Architecture and ideology’, New Criterion, December 2002. See http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3345/is_4_21/ai_n28962509>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[17] Quoted in Gian Galassi, op cit.
[18] Ibid.
[19] I’ve borrowed the concept of the ‘read/write’ city from Steve Lambert of the Anti- Advertising Agency who, writing about the visual environment and street art, states: ‘Why is read/write better? Because you can consume, process, and respond. This is how we think critically. This is how we learn. You can talk back. You can express yourself. You don’t just consume expression, you create expression. Read/write is how democracy works. There’s a reason kids want to write their names on walls. There’s a reason why people take graffiti seriously. Granted, graffiti writers don’t always know how to direct this energy, but I’d argue there’s some overlap with the reasons one writes their name on a wall and the reasons one runs for the school board. Being able to write means being able to affect your environment. To change it. You exist in the world not as a consumer, but an active citizen. Read only culture creates apathy.’ From Steve Lambert, ‘Demand a Read/Write City’, The Anti-Advertising Agency, 3 October, 2008. See http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/demand-a-readwrite-city, accessed 26 January 2009.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Michelle Lord.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear

Information on Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design.

In this highly pertinent issue, guest-editor Nic Clear questions received notions of the future. Are the accepted norms of economic growth and expansion the only means by which society can develop and prosper? Should the current economic crisis be making us call into question a future of unlimited growth? Can this moment of crisis – economic, environmental and technological – enable us to make more informed choices about the type of future that we want and can actually achieve? Architectures of the Near Future offers a series of alternative voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and original visions of what might be to come. Rather than providing simplistic and seductive images of an intangible shiny future, it rocks the cosy world of architecture with polemical blasts.

* Draws on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, Postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics and developments in neurology.
* Includes an exploration of the work of JG Ballard.
* Features the work of Ben Nicholson.

Editorial (Helen Castle ).
Introduction: A Near Future (Nic Clear).
Urban Flux (Matthew Gandy).
Postindividualism: Fata Morgana and the Swindon Gout Clinic (Michael Aling).
Urban Otaku: Electric Lighting and the Noctambulist (John Culmer Bell).
The Groom’s Gospel (Bastian Glassner).
Hong Kong Labyrinths (Soki So).
Distructuring Utopias (Rubedo: Laurent-Paul Robert and Vesna Petresin Robert).
The Carbon Casino (Richard Bevan).
Cities Gone Wild (Geoff Manaugh).
London After the Rain (Nic Clear).
L.A.W.u.N. Project #21: Cybucolia (Samantha Hardingham and David Greene).
Cortical Plasticity (Dan Farmer).
The Ridiculous and the Sublime (Ben Nicholson).
Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment (Simon Sellars).
The Sound Stage (George Thomson).
Recent History – Art In Ruins (Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks/Art in Ruins and Nic Clear)

Practice Profile.
Snøhetta (Jayne Merkel).
Interior Eye.
Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford (Howard Watson).
Building Profile.
St Benedict’s School, West London (David Littlefield).
Unit Factor.
Migration Pattern Process (Simon Beames and Kenneth Fraser).
Spiller’s Bits.
Mathematics of the Ideal Pavilion (Neil Spiller).
Yeang’s Eco-Files.
Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign (Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang).
McLean’s Nuggets (Will McLean).
Userscape
Scaleable Technology for Smart Spaces (Valentina Croci).

Spain’s economic downturn means that its rampant property development is galloping way, way ahead of potential buyers. And this means ghost cities — in one instance just 750 people living in a development comprising 13,000 residential units. It’s a trend across the Iberian peninsula: Solveig Nordlund filmed Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, her 2002 feature-film adaptation of Ballard’s ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’, in and around a similar development in Portugal. This was a very canny move on her part, welding this real-world urban slipstream with Ballard’s own disconnected un-reality in a story about dwindling population levels and the high strangeness of techno-capitalism.

Watch this BBC video report for more background on the current state of Spain’s ghost cities. The lack of company wouldn’t bother me. I’d move in there in a heartbeat. Imagine the solitude.

[thanks, Joe McNally]

Margarida Marinho in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 2002).

An interview with Solveig Nordlund follows this review, plus clips from Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude.

In 2002 the Ballardian feature-film universe expanded substantially with the release of Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, Solveig Nordlund’s artfully rendered riff on JG Ballard’s 1976 short story, ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. Seen mainly at film festivals, this Portuguese-Swedish co-production was a welcome addition to the Ballard filmography.

Ballard’s story receives its power from its fantastic setting (an abandoned Spanish resort in the future), his trio of representative characters – Dr Gould, the iconoclast visionary, Richard Forrester, the horny bureaucrat, and Judith Forrester, the mannequin-like mother – and the dark irony of ignoring Mother Nature. Ballard slowly teases out the plot, revealing that humankind has been systematically killing off its deformed newborn (called ‘Zotes’ in the film) for the past thirty years, seemingly unaware they were slaughtering the first generation of a new variation of homo sapiens. The story’s genius lies in its deft and subtle details and immaculate timing, leading the reader blindly along with Forrester through sex hotels of irony to the oddly optimistic ending, where the culture of one empire again crumbles and the children of the world begin to assume control of their new universe.

Culture’s fear of the unknown and special revulsion toward the sexually deformed is analyzed in psychological and artistic terms in ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. These babies aren’t born with deformities of the limbs, such as the thalidomide babies of the 1960s, but with optic-nerve-exposed eyes and deformed genitals, aberrations guaranteed to register high on the psychological disgust scale. In this otherworld, mothers will kill, not nurture, their abnormal babies. Forrester sees these sexual deformities as ‘grim parodies of human genitalia’, and he cannot go beyond the ‘nervousness and loathing’ they elicit. All is now subject to an irrational norm. Blind but sighted, sexually deviant but innocent, these doomed children offer up a Dorian Gray portrait of civilisation’s obsessions which everyone is only too willing to rip and burn, horrified at seeing their true selves revealed at last.

In the following interview, Nordlund says, ‘I centred the story on the woman, on her fears and longings’. By inverting the masculinity of the short story, the film reclaims the natural bond of mother and baby and corrects the errors of civilisation as Ballard imagines it. As Nordlund explains: ‘When I did the film I thought very much about parents who want to educate their children into copies of themselves and don’t see the beauty of difference.’

LEFT: Solveig Nordlund (photo by Rick McGrath).

The basic plot is still there – the deformed baby is given to Carmen after the epiphany that these newborn aren’t monsters – but pretty well everything else, save the location, is changed to a feminine perspective, a parallel version of Ballard’s original. In Ballard’s story Judith is essentially a baby incubator, reflecting culture’s taboos and fears about abnormality. She immediately forgets all after the child is born and presumed killed, leaving the resort ‘with the amiable and fixed expression of a display-window mannequin’. Nordlund re-creates her as the driving force behind the story, from her desire to have the baby through her troubled pregnancy to her transformative encounters with Carmen and her ultimate ‘correct’ decision. She and Carmen bond to the point where they start looking the same. In a world of generational warfare, this is definitely an act of peace. Gould changes from Ballard’s observant biker hippie pilot into a surrogate mother — thus retaining a slight echo to Ballard’s Gould — and Nordlund is forced to compensate for his philosophic posturings by greatly enlarging the role of Carmen. A black-shawled, hand-signing mongoloid waif in Ballard, found by Gould and herded by silver paint, she’s transformed by Nordlund into a complex mystery, an exotic beauty in slink who wanders the dark halls like a hologram from the future. Forrester’s role is also diminished – he either makes passes at Judite or is combing the deserted grounds, talking with Gould, or stalking Carmen.

Nordlund keeps her eye firmly on the social by replacing Ballard’s Dali references with state-produced posters showing Zotes on the one hand (baby head with dark, wormy areas where the eyes should be, and the menacing ZOTE written underneath) and normal babies on the other (complete with slogans such as “This Is Us” and “I Believe In The Future”). Nordlund has created the same psychological war zone as Ballard, pitting Eros against Thanatos, but she uses a much less psychologically sensitive path, replacing personal “newsreels from Hell” and the attendant disgust with “monsters” one should fear because they’re seen as grotesque throwbacks to an earlier, more primitive time. The sense of disgust, so prevalent in the short story, is not given any kind of deep psychological examination by Nordlund, although flushing a Zote down the toilet is some recognition of the feeling’s psychological roots.

The film is a marvellous treat for eye and ear. Carmen’s psychedelic cave-room, for example, with its watches and fluorescent lighting is amazing. The cinematography of Acácio de Almeida is often breathtaking in its subtle love affair with light, and the music by Johan Zachrisson is evocative and emotional. The special effects are often highly foregrounded to maximise the intimate effect, and art direction is helped immeasurably by the found set, an abandoned seaside resort in Spain. This is a strong, punchy movie that emphasises the flow of the action in carefully crafted edits.

I made contact with Solveig Nordlund during the July opening ceremonies of J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium exhibition at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Culture, where Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude was (and will be) screening. We met for a chat and coffee on our final day there, but unfortunately circumstances made it impossible to do any kind of formal interview. Fortunately, Solveig graciously agreed to conduct the following email Q&A after we had settled down from the Millennium Autopsy rush.

– Rick McGrath.

Opening 10-minute sequence from Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude. Two further 10-minute extracts are available: Part 2 and Part 3.

RICK McGRATH: Solveig, can you tell us when you first became interested in film, and about the beginnings of your career?

SOLVEIG NORDLUND: I was always interested in film, since I was a child, and I wanted to become a filmmaker. I just didn’t know how. To satisfy my mother I studied at the University of Stockholm and participated in a film made by a theatre group, but I had already met my Portuguese husband and wanted to leave Sweden. My Portuguese husband studied film in London and I followed him there and so it began. I began to work with him and only later did I make proper studies, with the French director Jean Roch in Paris from 1972 to 74.

Do you remember when you first became aware of Ballard?

I read Ballard for the first time in the late 60s in a Portuguese science-fiction collection. I think the first story of his I read was ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’. It must have had a great impact. I began to read all his books and later I made a short film based on this story, called ‘Journey to Orion’. It was totally shot in one of those big ferries between Stockholm and Helsinki. The idea was that the inside of ferryboats and spacecrafts look more or less the same: a closed world with no exit. Made to last for a long time and endure tough weather. After that I obtained the rights to shoot ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’.

When I had the opportunity in 1986 to propose programs about different writers for Swedish television, I proposed Ballard and managed to convince the board. I went to London in order to visit him at his house in Shepperton. I did a series of portraits of my literary favourites, another one was Marguerite Duras. In Sweden the JG interview was called ‘Future Now’ and everybody was impressed with his intensity. JG himself liked it very much. For me it was an opportunity to get to know him and the beginning of a kind of friendship.

What kind of friendship can you have with J.G.? I think I’d always have the feeling he was sizing me up as a potential character. In The Kindness of Women, the family renting the apartment beside the Ballards in Spain are called the Nordlunds. Did you think J.G. was thinking of you?

I feel befriended with Ballard and his universe. That’s the kind of friendship it is. I think he wrote The Kindness of Women at the same time as I made the interview with him. He probably needed a name and took mine.

Was he as you expected?

I expected to meet a tall military-like man and got very surprised when a small, jovial and round man came out of the house. He asked if I had a hat and made me think of Alice in Wonderland. He invited me in and as it was already six in the afternoon he was authorized to begin to drink. We talked and planned the interview for the following day. J.G. Ballard is a fascinating storyteller, also when he is telling his own story.

When you first read ‘Low Flying Aircraft’, did it strike you as filmable?

I think all J.G. Ballard’s stories are filmable and I think I have thought of them all as films. I was on a film festival in Troia, Portugal, the seaside resort that I later used in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude. I think it was in 1987. Troia was a tourist investment that was interrupted by the revolution in 1974, and this abandoned place struck me as the perfect set for a Ballard story. I thought of stories from Vermillion Sands and Low-Flying Aircraft. It took me 15 years to concretise the project.

That’s amazing, that these big lumps of resort would still be vacant after all those years. You must have been amazed. How did you first get in? With permission, or as a trespasser?

It was a tourist project that had begun to be built before the revolution with Brazilian money and that was nationalised after the revolution. Some buildings were used but they never finished the big hotels. They were a kind of unfinished ruins, that you could enter trespassing.

How did Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude come about?

After having done the Swedish television program ‘Future Now’ with Jim, I did ‘Journey to Orion’. After that I obtained the rights to film ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. The film is a Portuguese-Swedish low budget co-production. At the beginning I thought of shooting it in English, with international actors, but the budget didn’t allow it. And as there were threats that they were going to reconstruct the seaside resort Troia, I had to hurry with the film. It was shot in 2002 and one or two years later the towers were imploded.

‘Journey to Orion’ (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 1987). Part 2 is also available.

When did you decide to make the alterations to J.G.’s basic plot?

Ballard’s story is a short story and I had to do a feature film. In Ballard’s story everything is in the head of the husband who is waiting for his wife to come back with the results of the scan. I centred the story on the woman, on her fears and longings. I participated in a workshop directed by the English script doctor Colin Tucker in order to elaborate the script in that sense. It works in the way that a group of people with scripts criticise each other’s works. Colin Tucker directed us.

How did you choose the cast and crew?

The crew was chosen among technicians I normally work with, Acácio de Almeida for example. The cast was chosen among Portuguese actors once it was decided that there was no possibility to have an international cast. I think we shot for eight weeks. And edited for another six weeks. There were some complementary shots and a rather long digital post-production. From the start of shooting till the film finished, it was nine months more or less.

I was slightly surprised by the Orwellian society you use as a backdrop. Where did that idea come from?

I think it comes from Jim Ballard. When I asked him if it was something he thought I should think about when writing the script, he mentioned the laws of genetic cleaning that until very recently were in use for example in Sweden, and the fear of global epidemics, for example, AIDs.

Interesting. Governments are vaguely mentioned in the short story, but in your version they actively seek out and destroy the newborn, which you call Zotes. I like your slogan, too: ‘We Believe In The Future. This is Us.’ Where did that come from?

From nowhere especial. Just sounded right.

How often did you consult with Ballard over the film?

Only in the beginning, when I asked if he had something he wanted to point out in the story.

What do you think is J.G.’s point in the short story? Given the variations in the film, do you feel it still represents Ballard’s vision, or your own?

I think J.G.’s point is to show that humans make everything to transform and dominate nature but that nature always will find new dimensions in order to survive. When I did the film I thought very much about parents who want to educate their children into copies of themselves and don’t see the beauty of difference.

Has J.G. seen it?

Yes, and he liked it very much. He wrote a very enthusiastic letter where he mentioned especially the cinematography and the actress, Margarida Marinho.

She is fantastic. How did you find her?

She is a very well-known and popular Portuguese actress now, but in 2002 she was in the beginning of her career.

The cinematography is truly breathtaking. Aside from the power of the sets, Acácio De Almeida’s lens seems to caress the light in a very Ballardian way. You must have been very happy with the results.

Yes I was. I also was very lucky to have a very good post-production laboratory with very good technicians.

I was also quite taken with the film’s art direction. Mona Teresia Forsén did an amazing job with the film’s overall look. Did you work this out together? Gould’s stylized fluorescent green ‘V’ sign is also compelling.

Mona Teresia Forsén is a very well-known Swedish art director, but there were many hands that collaborated in the creation of the visual aspect. The Zote alphabet, for example, was created by the Portuguese artist Rui Serra.

I thought the sound was foregrounded in an interesting way, and that Johan Zachrisson’s musical score is very evocative. Did you work closely on this with Johan?

Yes. Johan Zachrisson is a collaborator of mine since a long time. He is Swedish but lives and works in Portugal. I think we tried to get a correspondence to the green colour that the doctor paints the world with.

You show Carmen in the film as a sort of futuristic movie starlet, with sexy dark glasses.

Carmen hides her deformed eyes behind dark glasses. She is blind in a conventional way, she sees with other senses, that’s why she moves in such an adulatory way. Don’t forget that her father, the doctor, has made her look like an ordinary Venus client in order to protect her.

Are you influenced by any particular filmmakers?

I admire Alain Resnais’ Muriel and Providence.

Do you think your film has a happy ending?

Yes. Life goes on even if it is not our life.

Will the film ever be available on DVD? Many people are curious to see it.

It is on DVD in Portugal. If somebody is interested in publishing it with English subtitles I would be happy.

Miguel Guilherme and Rui Morrison in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 2002).

Do you have plans to do anything more from the Ballard oeuvre?

I like very much ‘Deep End’, the story about the last fish on Earth. I had plans to do Concrete Island. I think it is an amazing story and so frightening. You can die in the middle of the crowd without anybody seeing you. But the rights JG’s agent demanded were so high that it’s not possible. But who knows, he has many good short stories.

You told me in Barcelona you didn’t think any more JGB stories would be made into films because of the cost of film rights. Can you elaborate?

I think J.G.’s agent has set a Spielberg level for his novels.

I heard £3.5 million — that’s a lot of money. I wonder if JG knows what’s going on? You’d think he’d like to have his stories made into movies, where reality and illusion combine.

I think he knows and agrees.

What appeals to you most about JGB?

J.G.’s stories are often told as thoughts and memories, but those thoughts and memories are very visual. I like to imagine those worlds the main characters see. I think that had the film rights been more accessible, most of his novels would have been made into film. Now, a lot of films inspired by his work have been made instead.

Many people who have visited the Ballard home comment on its quirkiness. Did you find it unusual?

I found it touching, a big man in a small house. Like Alice in Wonderland.

Interview by Rick McGrath, 2008.

Born in Stockholm on June 9, 1943, Solveig Nordlund began working in film while completing her degree in art history from her native Stockholm’s Universitet. Leaving Sweden for Portugal, Nordlund first worked as an assistant and then a film editor on such productions as Sweet Habits (1973) and Doomed Love (1978). In 1976 she co-founded the left-wing film cooperative Grupo Zero, and that year directed her first film, although she received no on-screen credit. In 1978, she directed a pair of medium-length features, but did not direct her first full-length feature until 1980 with Dina e Django. Nordlund then returned to Sweden in 1982 where she founded the Torrom Film Company. In 1986 she directed ‘Journey to Orion’, her take on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, which won a prize at the Bilbao Festival, and also directed a filmed interview with Ballard called Future Now. In 1998, Nordlund’s Swedish-Portuguese-Mozambican co-production Comedia Infantil was nominated for a Tiger Award at that year’s Rotterdam Film Festival. In 1999 she made The Ticket Inspector, which won the RTP/Onda Curta Prize at the Avanca Film Festival, and followed that with Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude in 2002, which won an award at the Coimbra Caminhos do Cinema Portugués, and My Baby in 2003.

..:: MORE INFORMATION:
+ Ambar Filmes: blog for Solveig’s film company.
+ Ambar Filmes’ YouTube channel.

..:: NORDLUND & BALLARD ON YOUTUBE:
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude trailer.
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 1).
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 2).
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 3).
+ Future Now interview (extract).
+ ‘Journey to Orion’, part 1.
+ ‘Journey to Orion’, part 2.

review by Jamie Sherry

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 1 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Runtime: 18 mins
Voice: Ermanna Montanari
Sound: Davide Sandri
Music: Egle Sommacal
Editor: Benedetto Lanfranco
Photography: Alvise Renzini
Animation: Alvise Renzini
Script: Lucio Apolito (based on the short story ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ by J.G. Ballard)
Director: Alvise Renzini
Producer: Opificio Ciclope

NOTE: An English translation of the voiceover can be found here.

In discussion about his adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love (1984), the director Volker Schlöndorff famously remarked that ‘if I make a movie which Proustians celebrate for its fidelity, I will have failed as a director’. Predictably, the film was widely criticised for misrepresenting the source material and for perceived acts of violent reductionism. It was these issues that framed my viewing of the Italian animation Grande Anarca, based on my favourite Ballard short story, ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985). As a devotee of Ballard’s post-60s short stories, I was expecting to be underwhelmed by the film, regardless of my interest in the idea of adapting such an un-cinematic work of prose. The film ended up actually exceeding my expectations, deviating from the demands of a faithful adaptation, yet finding a life of its own amongst the wider architecture of the Ballardian.

The study of literature on film has largely liberated itself from the confines of the ‘fidelity debate’ and aesthetic judgements regarding how close the film is deemed to be to the ‘spirit of the book’. Cartmell and Whelehan’s Adaptations (1999), Stam and Raengo’s Literature and Film (2004) and Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), amongst others, have done much to progress the study of adaptation, a field that has privileged the status of literature over film. For too long film adaptations have been viewed as misrepresenting, reducing, despoiling and ultimately failing to capture an essential essence somehow contained in the source text. Film adaptations are judged by what they fail to do, or what they omit, rather than what they achieve, or add. Within an atheistic, post-structuralist view of adaptation, the novel does not contain a ‘spirit’, but is rather an intertextual assortment of many precursor texts that make up the bricolage landscape of culture. It is with this more open and democratic approach to adaptation that Grande Anarca should be approached, appreciating the intertextual methodology that has been employed in the adaptation process.

First published in Ambit 100 (Spring 1985), ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ is a fascinating, if unlikely, choice of source material for a film adaptation. Very much an understudied story, it sits alongside ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) and The Index (1977) as Ballard’s most experimental and playful self-contained short stories, whilst also sharing many of his central themes concerning madness and incarceration. Eventually published together in the compendium War Fever (1990), these stories mischievously subvert classical notions of structure, form and content, unifying Ballard’s playful deployment of paratexts as narrative medium. The French literary theorist Gérard Genette coined the neologism ‘paratext’ to describe subsidiary and secondary material such as prefaces, post-scripts, footnotes and illustrations, which illuminate, but are ultimately subservient to, the principle text. As Ballard himself noted in Paris Review (Winter,1984): ‘lists are fascinating; one could almost do a list novel’.

Ballard sets out to exploit these paratextual narrative devices to self-consciously confront the reader, and include us in an ironic discourse with the text. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown (not to be confused with the chapter of the same name in The Atrocity Exhibition) commences with a lone 18-word sentence; the rest of the story comprising eighteen footnotes cited from each word, the sentence savagely deconstructed by a mental asylum inmate into its constituent units. The story is reminiscent of, and arguably indebted to, Vladimir Nabokov’s metafictional novel Pale Fire (1962), a narrative famously comprised of a character’s foreword, index and commentary on a murdered poet’s 999-line poem. As Pale Fire progresses, rather than shedding light on the elliptical poem, these fictional paratexts instead begin to illuminate the delusional psychological state of the annotator.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Continuing these techniques, the use of the classical paratext as a vehicle for story is probably best encapsulated in Ballard’s The Index. The narrative is conveyed via the listed index to an imaginary autobiography that, as the short introduction informs us, is missing, or may never have existed at all. Small snippets of information in the index ultimately converge to form narratives that spectacularly reveal Ballardian obsessions with mental breakdown, sexual deviance, murder, psychological spaces and institutional confinement.

It is these themes that also dominate ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, a piece that functions more by exclusion, than inclusion. Employing the metafictional technique of showing only the answers to questions set by an unknown authoritarian presence, a narrative becomes clear that would traditionally far exceed the limitations of a short story. As the answers progress, we learn that the interviewee is a man living surreptitiously in Ballard’s beloved Heathrow Airport:

1) Yes.
2) Male (?)
3) c/o Terminal 3, London Airport, Heathrow.
4) Twenty-seven.
5) Unknown.
6) Dr Barnado’s Primary, Kingston-upon-Thames; HM Borstal, Send, Surrey; Brunel University Computer Sciences Department.

Sometimes the answers are deliberately obtuse, with no obvious allusion to a potential question. At other times the answers are detailed in an ironic way, completely out place with the sequence of narrative events (see answer 14 below). We soon learn about the interviewee, including his criminal history:

10) Manchester Crown Court, 1984.
11) Credit card and computer fraud.
12) Guilty.
13) Two years, HM Prison, Parkhurst.
14) Stockhausen, de Kooning, Jack Kerouac.
15) Whenever possible.
16) Twice a day.
17) NSU, Herpes, gonorrhoea.

It becomes clear that the interviewee believes he befriended the second coming of Jesus within Heathrow Airport, and begins to help him with his project to provide mankind with the power of immortality:

27) I took him to Richmond Ice Rink where he immediately performed six triple salchows. I urged him to take up ice-dancing with an eye to the European Championships and eventual gold at Seoul, but he began to trace out huge double spirals on the ice. I tried to convince him that these did not feature in the compulsory figures, but he told me that the spirals represented a model of synthetic DNA.
35) When he was drunk. He claimed that he brought the gift of eternal life.
61) He stated that synthetic DNA introduced into the human germ plasm would arrest the process of ageing and extend human life almost indefinitely.
81) Government White Paper on Immortality.
82) Compulsory injection into the testicles of the entire male population over eleven years.

The protagonist accompanies this man, as he meets with members of the royal family, politicians and celebrities in a bid to raise money for the Immortality project. The plan clearly gets out of control for the interviewee, as he takes matters into his own hands:

88) Assassination.
89) I was neither paid nor incited by agents of a foreign power.
90) Despair. I wish to go back to my cubicle at London Airport.
97) I was visited in the death cell by the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
98) That I had killed the Son of God.
99) He walked with a slight limp. He told me that, as a condemned prisoner, I alone had been spared the sterilising injections, and that the restoration of the national birthrate was now my sole duty.
100) Yes.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 2 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Ballard’s investment in us as active readers also allows meaning to be gained from absence. Ballard finds his preoccupations and themes best explored through the paratexts that traditionally surround culture’s dominant storytelling mediums. A list of answers, an index, and the footnotes of a single sentence become vehicles for the Ballardian. It is within this free interplay with the reader that we are able to construct a narrative, regardless of how unreliable the protagonist may or may not be. Within these empty spaces and narrative vacuums, the reader is empowered to create meaning. The dichotomous function of these omissions provoke us to address the character’s mental state, and serves to further problematise the role of the unreliable narrator/s within. As the author Ursula K Le Guin states in her review of War Fever, Ballard opts for storytelling in which we see the ‘condition of fictional bones without flesh — crystals without molecular instabilities to cloud the clarity’. Ballard uses metatextual techniques to highlight the devices of fiction and in doing so, provokes the reader to dwell on the relationships between fantasy and reality, concepts central to ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’.

It is these narrative devices so rooted in the literary form of the story that potentially problematise a cinematic adaptation (yet also make the concept very alluring). Conceived from the perspective that the source material is merely a starting point, Alvise Renzini’s short animation Grande Anarca diverts from ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ in a number of notable ways. Although strongly influenced by the unusual structure of Ballard’s original text, the film completely dispenses with the central storyline of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, ignoring the second-coming, immortality project, murder of Jesus plot points. However, there is continuity in the film’s eerie voiceover, as the omnipotent narrator answers a set of unheard questions. Replacing the Jesus narrative with a story regarding a genetic experiment carried out on the inhabitants of a block of flats, the film also manages to confront and adapt the medium-specific tropes encoded in the literary form of the source material.

Although Renzini is credited with photography, animation and direction, the film is clearly a group effort, produced under the ‘joint tradename’ of Opificio Ciclope. Producers of various media forms, including music videos, TV graphics and documentaries, the Italian collective purports to have a ‘shared interest for interacting, mixed techniques and hybrid formats’. It is certainly this mastering of art/media forms that bestows Grande Anarca with a unique visual complexity.

The film is literally multi-layered, the images painstakingly built up in successive levels. Firstly, the background is hand-illustrated, the images then photographed and projected as slides. These slide projections are then shot using 35mm film, the individual frames then serving as a canvass to be painted and etched upon. Finally, digital post-production provides the last layer to complete the film. This inter-medial technique for building a film layer-by-layer brings to mind the German short film Copyshop (2001) in which a photocopy shop worker begins to literally replicate himself in an endless cycle. The short is produced by filming almost 18,000 photocopies of digital frames. It could be said that these animation devices, particularly well executed in Grande Anarca, in which the viewer is confronted with the mechanics and textual processes of the medium, somehow mirror the self-conscious literary referencing of Ballard’s original story.

And it is within this visual process that Grande Anarca evokes much of its drama. Dark fractured imagery blends onto inanimate objects which drift into our vision, as obscured tower blocks meld into shimmering close-ups of cells and bacteria. Distorted alien-like bodies glimmer before us, gasworks flash, abject bodies morph into DNA structures. Buildings vying for dominance over nature obtain a hallucinatory quality as swift editing coupled with repetitious music (dramatic repeating violin chords) compliment the images of tree like cells inhabiting cityscapes. The film ranges between stark black and white before displaying sepia tinted browns and blues. Although ostensibly an animation, the film does feature real footage of apartment blocks and abandoned train stations. The geometrics of man-made, Vorticist shapes mingle haphazardly with biological structures. The calm, dispassionate voiceover and the melodious repetition of the music almost produce a feeling that we are watching a propaganda film, benevolently advertising a social experiment, only the visuals offering a sinister reminder that all is not well.

The story that unfolds in Grande Anarca is clearly a major deviation from Ballard’s source story, but it is the narrative replacements that really illuminate the film-makers application to the task. The answers start off relatively dull, though are notable by their contrast to Ballard’s original text:

01) Corals.
02) Light.
03) A face-shaped flower vase.
04) Glaciers.
05) Emerald green.
06) Science fiction books: Fritz Leiber, James Ballard, Stanislaw Lem.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

As the film develops, it becomes clear that the narrator was involved in a complex genetic experiment on the inhabitants of a huge multi-storey building:

20) Tenants were selected from thousands of applicants.
21) Yes, I think it was a crucial event in my life.
22) Apartments were identical in shape, size, and decors. The building was divided into 22 units, identified with a letter. Each unit had 8 floors. Each floor housed 64 persons in as many apartments. The whole of the tenants were divided in 4 groups: A, T, C, G. The building contained 5632 persons.
23) I was part of the original project team, and I came up with several of the ideas in the experiment.

Importantly, the inhabitants of the building are represented by the protagonist as being both co-operative and willing participants:

30) All the tenants were aware of the nature of the experiment in different ways. I would not therefore paint in-house relations as unconscious.
31) They were deeply involved in the experiment, and they talked about it regularly: when they met on the stairs or in the garden, or during building meetings.
32) Each tenant had to spend 4 hours with the other three individuals on his team, then 8 hours on his own. He had to write 4 pages a day. In the early stages, that was how we looked for similar descriptions, cross-references, reoccurring words. At a later stage, they were forced to write about their personal desires. Finally, about their dreams.
33) In each apartment, a pneumatic system provided food rations in exchange for the reports. Locks were automatically operated. To open the doors, tenants had to deliver their daily reports.

Eventually we see thematic cross-overs with Ballard’s original story, as the synthetic depiction of DNA creates a startling psycho-pathologic relationship:

36) The building was a to-scale replica of the DNA from algae. Tenants represented nucleotides.
37) We wanted to communicate directly with the DNA, with no go-betweens.
38) We wanted to endow it with some sort of awareness.
39) By collecting the tenants’ dreams.
40) We measured everything: heartbeats, the patterns created on the windows by electric light, decibels. Everything.

As the voiceover draws the film to a close we start to view the possibility that Renzini is sourcing more than just one Ballard text, with allusions to the effects of the building architectures acting as a kind of Tarkovskian Zone:

48) During the third stage, the building started to emit a frequency at night, while the tenants slept. The wave reached a range of over 20 kilometers. Suddenly everyone was aware of the experiment.
49) The wave from the building reverberated through the dreams of whoever lived in the area. It was those obsessive dreams that spurred the riots.
50) Lies, now as before, you keep repeating your lies.
51) That was not our purpose.
52) I would rather not talk about that.
53) Several such buildings were destroyed by mistake.
54) Scientific research is not a democratic system, nor should it be.
55) The experiment could be repeated.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 3 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

In Grande Anarca we see the narrative structure of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ married to the Ballardian tropes of urban alienation, techno-surveillance, sociological experimentation and the psychological consequences of man-made environments, as best exemplified in High-Rise (1975). So whilst the film may break free from the plot points of the source story, it still exists within a wider Ballardian universe. We see the moral complexity of social experimentation, the actions of a closed community reverting to a primal state and the symbiotic relationship between man and urban structures. As Rick McGrath states in his affectionate and incredibly detailed analysis of the novel, ‘Reconstructing High-Rise’:

The horror of meaningless acts piled high with Ballard’s trademark detatched omnipotent narrator. High-Rise can both shock and exhilarate its reader, and its insistence that the ‘ends justify the means’ reinforces Ballard’s geometry of violence…

Further to this we see textual equivalents in the actions of individuals acting as a group, and the type of belief systems (religious, political and moral) that can become normalised in the reverie of community psychology. McGrath again illuminates these notions of the intoxicating myth:

J.G. Ballard has often told interviewers that his characters all seek a kind of highly personal psychic salvation, and that they will, if necessary, create their own self-defining mythologies and pursue them to their furthest logical ends, no matter how illogical it seems, or what the cost. In High-Rise, Ballard has created an isolated environment for the close study of the deconstruction of an ultra-modern apartment block into a new, devolved society…

The compliance of the subjects in the film to willingly engage with these socio-scientific experiments, even though their food can be kept from them if they do not co-operate, draws on some well explored Ballardian areas. What is exposed in both High-Rise and Grande Anarca is a pathological willingness to be imprisoned or otherwise confined in institutional regimes. As Ballard puts it in a 2001 Literary Review article, we can see ‘hints that a benign version of a Sadeian society is still emerging, of tormentors and willing victims’. Ballard explores the willingness to be dominated by these architectures of control, as the character Sinclair notes in Super-Cannes (2000), these ‘totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong’.

Unfortunately, Grande Anarca is far from perfect, and at least for me, fails on one quite fundamental level. In most cases I am an admirer of extreme deviation from the adapted source material, but Renzini, like so many others, appears to disregard or ignore the ironic humour that saturates most pages of Ballard’s writing. From the opening line of High-Rise, through to most of the chapter titles in The Atrocity Exhibtion, Ballard is able to infuse his stories with subtle but biting wit. Taking ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ as an example, many of the protagonist’s answers are nothing more than in-jokes as Ballard plays with the edges of humour in ways that are reminiscent both of Bret Easton Ellis and William S Burroughs:

33) Porno videos. He took a particular interest in Kamera Klimax and Electric Blue.
34) Almost every day.
36) At the Penta Hotel I tried to introduce him to Torvill and Dean…
37) Females of all ages.
38) Group sex.
58) He had a keen appreciation of money, but was not impressed when I told him of Torvill and Dean’s earnings.
63) He announced that Princess Diana was immortal.
71) He wanted me to become the warhead of a cruise missile.

The humour found in Ballard’s work is usually satirical, sometimes surreal, and always illustrative of the moral malaise infused through the story. To ignore Ballard’s humour, as I feel the makers of Grande Anarca have done, is to reduce Ballard to less than the sum of his parts. But these actions could be considered deliberate aesthetic acts, removing humour for the sake of some artistic achievement.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Traditionally, fans of Ballard’s writing have had an uneasy relationship with adaptations of his writing. It seems that for some, films that explore Ballardian themes, or which have influenced Ballard, can offer more comforting routes to understand his work. These include both Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and Solyaris (1972), Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Lucas’ THX 1138 (1971), and of course the most potent Ballardian film, Chris Marker’s remarkable short La Jetée (1962). All benefit from their potential to be arguably more useful cinematic texts with which to contextualise Ballardian tropes, than actual official adaptations of his own books. These films are liberated from the compare-contrast analysis that dogs literal Ballard adaptations such as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) and Weiss’ The Atrocity Exhibition (2000), amongst a host of others. The confining responsibility of fidelity can raise the stakes for the Ballard reader, in which we are not always able to read these films either objectively or fairly.

Cronenberg, both in Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash attempts to decant experimental literary narratives into a more linear cinematic language (albeit an idiosyncratically unorthodox one). Perhaps to the point where his earlier films Videodrome (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988) could be seen as a more fitting arena to explore the Ballardian. Likewise, Spielberg’s moral subjectivity, a kind of revisionist 50′s idea of ‘Boys Own’ heroism and the inevitable triumph of good over evil, constrains his adaptation of Empire of the Sun. To the point where many, as before, may find more interesting material in his Duel (1971) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) with which to better understand the relationship between Ballard and cinema. It is left to one’s imagination to wonder what could have occurred if counter-intuitively, Cronenberg had taken on Empire the Sun, and Spielberg tackled the auto-erotic allegories of Crash.

I believe that Weiss’ over-faithful use of iconic 60s imagery in his bold reworking of The Atrocity Exhibition makes the film stand out for me, in contrast to some who believe that these images lack cultural punch due to their sell-by-date expiring. In contrast to this, Renzini instead prefers to place further abstractions onto the source text. However, what the film does share with both Cronenberg and Weiss is a desire to inhabit the universe of the Ballardian. Far from slavishly conforming to Roland Barthes’ battle-cry that the ‘birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,’ Renzini pursues a thornier path – casting aside the author’s original narrative and replacing it with something that is loosely Ballardian, rather than strictly Ballard.

Perhaps there is something inherent in Ballard’s writing that actively resists successful adaptation. McGrath’s previous mention of Ballard’s trademark ‘detatched omnipotent narrator’ could be regarded as a profoundly uncinematic central character. Taking this further, McGrath expounds on the dynamically impotent character of Laing in High-Rise and the way in which he ‘survives because his driving psychic force is self-preservation through isolation and passivity’. Again, perhaps cinematic narratives resist passive characters, demanding more open, morally unambiguous, actively obstacle defeating heroes. This in marked contrast to the types that survive the carnage of High-Rise simply by keeping their head down, staying quiet and isolating themselves from the mayhem. It could also be argued that some adaptations fail because the source material is so prescriptive; readerly texts that imprint visual codas onto the reader, allowing little in the way of artistic flourishes for the adaptor. However, with Ballard the opposite could be true. The moral ambiguity, detached solipsism, and exclusion of characters’ first person psycho-dynamics mean that we can only form vague (yet highly personal) ideas of main protagonists. When we encounter these people on screen, in the flesh, saying words, and reacting to external agents, it is possible that we balk at both the unavoidable physical humanity before us, and the distinctly un-Ballardian theatrics of film-acting which we excluded from our original reading.

Grande Anarca enjoys a curiously dichotomous romance with Ballard. The aims seem contradictory: rejecting Ballard’s authority over the story, yet clearly conforming to the author’s recognised signifiers and themes. In the process of leaving the story behind, the makers of this film enter into a new dialogue, re-inhabiting and re-acquiring universal themes of the Ballardian, displaying what the Collins English Dictionary famously describes as ‘dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments’.

… MORE INFO:

+ Information on Grande Anarca at Opificio Ciclope

… GRANDE ANARCA:

+ Grande Anarca Part 1
+ Grande Anarca Part 2
+ Grande Anarca Part 3

+ English translation of the voiceover.

>

Ballardian muxtape accompanying this post.

This will be the last post related to the CCCB’s J.G. Ballard exhibition for a while. Next week normal service will resume, including a slew of archival Ballard interviews and articles as well as some newly commissioned posts.

For the CCCB exhibition, I curated a selection of Ballardian inspired sound art and music: 46 tracks in all. I tried to cover everything: the early 80s postpunk era, when Ballard’s influence was at its zenith; the found-sound sound art that echoes themes of urban degradation in Ballard’s work; recent Ballardian stuff such as Burial and kode9; the mid-90s world music strain; title and incidental music from Ballard film and TV adaptations, including all the obscure productions; the late 90s indie homages … even JGB’s Desert Island Disc selections.

Reproduced below is the brief synopsis and the annotated playlist I wrote for the exhibition catalogue. I’ve also compiled a Muxtape to accompany this post. It features 12 of the 46 tracks — for now, a representative sample that tries to at least touch on all the areas mentioned above.

‘NEGATIVE ACOUSTIC SPACE’: BALLARDIAN SOUND ART
by Simon Sellars

J.G. Ballard says he has a ‘tin ear’: that he has no taste for music, barely a feel for it, borne out by his Desert Island Disc selection for BBC radio which included ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’. There’s no music in his writing either, he insists – ‘I don’t know why. It’s just some gene that skipped me.’ He says with a Futurist flourish that ‘the most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns’. Yet his work has influenced a whole range of musicians. In the 80s he was consistently name-checked by influential postpunk and industrial artists: Ian Curtis, John Foxx, Steve Severin, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK. The word ‘Ballardian’ became shorthand for speed and violence, sex and death, but as with The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, the postpunk Ballard bibles, the ultimate aim was to transcend the post-industrial murk, not wallow in the malaise.

Then in the 1990s a curious strain of Ballardian world music began to emerge (notably from Finnish band Mo Boma, who explored Ballardian themes across a three-album cycle). This was lush, steamy and otherworldly, but not in the realm of clichéd exotica common to the genre, rather in the sense of vague unease, borderzones of the mind, the imagination rather than the third world as the last nature reserve. The aesthetic was wholly appropriate to the cycle of novels Ballard was writing – The Unlimited Dream Company, The Day of Creation, Rushing to Paradise – degraded, lysergic visions of mythical lands rusting and undermining the structural integrity of the urban West.

In recent times, Ballard’s influence on music seems to have waned although there is convergence with a cadre of sound artists who have magnified and critiqued the sonic footprint of the world’s cities and conurbations. Interact with any aspect of the Big City today, virtual or actual, and you will be enveloped with noise. When you pick up the handle of a petrol pump, an ad jingle plays. When you prowl the supermarket aisles, blaring adult rock replaces the sedative Muzak of yore. When you click on MySpace, smileys with artificial intelligence shout at you and autoplay music sutures the gaps. When you are put on hold for customer service, recorded voices puncture your calm inner space at regular intervals. In Ballard’s short story, ‘The Sound Sweep’ (1960), he warns of the virtual reality of artificially generated, negative acoustic space. Sixteen years later, in the novella ‘The Ultimate City’, he posits the chaotic sounds of the city as a beacon of vitality, an invigorating counterpoint to the enervating utopianism of hysterical eco-activists.

So, while it would appear to be true that there is no music in Ballard, there certainly is sound. Acoustic space is the last frontier to be colonised by late capitalism and Ballard records the process, but as always in his work, it can be as alienating or as invigorating as you care to make it.

– Simon Sellars, ballardian.com, 2008.

More info: see ballardian.com’s interview with Mike Ryan of RE/Search Publications.

PLAYLIST

‘Thirteen to Centaurus: Main Titles’ – Norman Kay (1964)
From the BBC TV adaptation of the Ballard short story.

‘Hello?’ – J.G. Ballard (2006)
JGB’s voice taken from ‘Rattling Other People’s Cages’, Simon Sellars’s interview with Ballard.

‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ – Val Rosen (1932)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection, a sinister choice in light of the evil mechanical bears in Kingdom Come.

‘Affirmative Dystopias’ – J.G. Ballard (2006)
JGB’s voice taken from ‘Rattling Other People’s Cages’, Simon Sellars’s 2006 interview with Ballard. Soundscape by Melanie Chilianis.

‘Cairo’ – The Future (1977)
Contains a spoken-word passage from The Atrocity Exhibition’s ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’:

‘This Venus of the dunes, virgin of the time-slopes, rose above Tallis into the meridian sky. The porous sand, reminiscent of the eroded walls of the apartment, and of the dead film star with her breasts of carved pumice and thighs of ash, diffused along its crests into the wind’.

‘I Want to Be A Machine’ – Ultravox! (1977)
Lyrics influenced by Ballard.

‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ – David Bowie (1977)
Mines the same ambivalent man-machine aesthetic as Ballard.

‘Warm Leatherette’ – The Normal (1978)
Lyrics based on Crash.

‘High Rise’ – Hawkwind (1979)
Lyrics based on High-Rise and the Ballard short, ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’.

‘Plaza’ – John Foxx (1980)
Lyrics influenced by Ballard.

‘Atrocity Exhibition’ – Joy Division (1980)
Title lifted from The Atrocity Exhibition.

‘The Him’ – New Order (1981)
Title taken from a passage in ‘You and Me and the Continuum’.

‘Let’s Do It’ – Noel Coward (1955)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. According to David Pringle, this choice ‘betrays a certain leaning towards clever lyrics’ but maybe Ballard just likes Coward’s image of machines having sex.

‘The Girl from Ipanema’ – Antonio Carlos Jobim (1962)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. This choice represents JGB’s attraction to ‘sizzling sex’, according to Pringle.

‘The Dead Astronaut’ (excerpt) – Vanishing Point (1988)
Taken from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series of Ballard radio plays.

‘The Final Strand’ – Michael Briel (1993)
From the album Crash: A Tribute to James Graham Ballard. According to Briel, it’s based on the JGB short, ‘The Final Strand’, but the story he’s actually referencing is ‘The Terminal Beach’ – Ballard’s title was lost in translation (Briel is German).

‘Golden Skans’ – Klaxons (2006)
Lyric inspired by Ballard’s ‘Myths of the Near Future’.

‘Mausoleum’ – Manic Street Preachers (1994)
Contains a sample from a Ballard interview: ‘I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror.’

‘Me and J.G. Ballard’ – Dan Melchior (2002)
Shepperton resident Dan Melchior describes seeing Ballard in the supermarket, but they never actually meet.

‘Dr Penrose Has the Solution’ – Super-Cannes (2004)
This band is named after Ballard’s Super-Cannes, and the song after a character in the book.

‘Home: End Titles’ – Andrew Phillips (2003)
Soundtrack from the BBC TV adaptation of the Ballard short story, ‘The Enormous Space’.

‘Low-Flying Aircraft: Main Titles’ – Johan Zachrisson (2002)
From the Solveig Nordlund film adaptation of the Ballard short story.

‘The Pheasant Hunt’ – John Williams (1987)
From the soundtrack to Spielberg’s film of Empire of the Sun.

‘Superchannel’ – Janek Schaefer (2002)
Inspired by Concrete Island, plus it’s musique concrete – get it?

‘Primal Image’ (excerpt) – Alan Lamb (1988)
Sounds produced entirely by wind through telegraph wires picked up by contact mics, with no processing or effects involved except for minor EQ. It is reminiscent of Ballard’s ‘The Sound Sweep’ and other early JGB shorts in which urban sound is trapped and magnified. A sample from this (or something very similar to it) is featured on the soundtrack to Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

‘The Swedish Rhapsody’ – Unknown (1997)
A recording of a ‘numbers station’ on short-wave radio. With their origin and purpose unknown, numbers stations are the audio equivalent of Ballard’s ‘invisible literature’. The idea of recording numbers stations, of trapping and recording arcane transmissions, is also reminiscent of T- building his strange radio receiver in Atrocity so he can tune in to pirate radio and ‘the time-music of the quasars’.

‘Don’t Fence Me In’ – Bing Crosby (1944)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. Again, David Pringle reckons this choice betrays JGB’s ‘leaning towards clever lyrics’.

‘The Marriage of Figaro (Highlights): Act IV Scene 11: Finale’ – Hungarian State Opera Orchestra (1786)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. The echoes of opera in ‘The Sound Sweep’ are inescapable. David Pringle muses: ‘The influence of Ballard working in Covent Garden flower market, outside the opera house, perhaps?’

‘Pace E Gioia Sia Con Voi (from the Barber of Seville)’ – Lang, Maloy, Modenas, Stilke, w/ Hamburg Radio Symphony Orch (1886)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. The opera references apply here, also.

‘Nested’ – Coti K (1993)
From the album Crash: A Tribute to James Graham Ballard.

‘More Songs About Factories: Part 4 (Itchy)’ – Camilla Hannan (2005)
Composed entirely of factory sounds, recorded in a similar manner to the Alan Lamb piece and freighted with the same Ballardian allusions.

‘Crash!’ – composer unknown; probably library sounds from the BBC audio archives (1971)
A montage stitched together by Simon Sellars of ambient sounds and music from the soundtrack to the Harley Cokliss short film, ‘Crash!’, which stars Ballard. Parts of this soundtrack appear remarkably similar to the Alan Lamb and Camilla Hannan pieces.

‘World War III As a Conceptual Act: The Atrocity Exhibition Main Titles’ – J.G. Thirlwell, aka Foetus (2001)
From the soundtrack to Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s book.

‘Road Research Laboratory’ – Howard Shore (1996)
From the soundtrack to David Cronenberg’s film of Crash.

‘Wind from Nowhere’ – Uzect Plaush (1994)
Patterned after Ballard’s first, disowned novel, a rare inspiration to say the least!

‘The Kindness of Women’ – Mo Boma (1994)
Inspired by the Ballard novel.

‘Matinkaari Bridge, Helsinki, Finland’ – Jodi Rose (2004)
Composed entirely of sounds made by the Matinkaari Bridge in Finland as it bends under the load of traffic, twisting and turning due to heat and cold. Recorded in a similar fashion as the Alan Lamb and Camilla Hannan pieces, with the same sonic/conceptual allusions to Ballard’s work.

‘Forgive’ – Burial (2006)
For better or worse, the music of Burial has been branded ‘Ballardian’ by all and sundry. But is Ballard as downbeat as this?

‘Track 12 (The Kiss)’ – Cousin Silas (2006)
Inspired by the Ballard short story.

‘Lime’ – kode9 (2006)
kode9 is Steve Goodman, a lecturer and theorist who has written on what he terms Ballard’s ‘sonic fiction’, including ‘The Sound Sweep’. The urban influence of Ballard’s music unavoidably seeps into the music.

‘Falling in Love Again’ – Marlene Dietrich (1964)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. Marlene’s frigid yet sexy film persona is surely very close to JGB’s cold and impenetrable women characters.

‘Put the Blame on Mame’ – Rita Hayworth (1946)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. More ‘sizzling sex’, says Pringle.

‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’ – Kevin Mahoney (2006)
Mahoney’s self-styled ‘iconoclastic tribute’ to Ballard.

..:: Related:
+ Tribute to J.G. Ballard & Brian Eno
+ A Ballardian Burial
+ ‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection
+ A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: The John Foxx Interview
+ Critical Mass: Sound, Story and Music in David Cronenberg’s Crash
+ ‘No-One Dances in Ballard’: An Interview with Mike Ryan
+ Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard

…:: More info on the exhibition:

+ More exhibition photography from Rick McGrath
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

…:: Exhibition-related posts on Ballardian:

+ Postcards from Barcelona
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

by Mike Holliday

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘News from the Sun’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age, Arkham House, 1988).

The late 70s and early 80s represent a sort of interregnum in Ballard’s career — between the last of the urban disaster novels, High-Rise (1975), and the success of Empire of the Sun (1984). During this period he published two of his most atypical novels, The Unlimited Dream Company and Hello America, and returned to earlier concerns with three short stories that are preoccupied with time, and which recall such works as The Crystal World and ‘The Voices of Time’. These three stories — ‘News from the Sun’ (1981), ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982), and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982) — are all concerned with a psychological disturbance of our perception of the flow of time, a dislocation that has been caused, somehow, by human space-flight. These stories are so similar to each other that one might suspect self-plagiarism, were they not written by Ballard. In the chronologically arranged Complete Short Stories, they sit there one after the other, eighty or so pages of obsessive investigation of the same themes.

‘Memories of the Space Age’ can serve as an exemplar for all three stories. Dr Mallory, an ex-NASA physician, has driven from Vancouver with his wife, Anne, to reach an abandoned Cape Kennedy in search of Hinton — an astronaut who murdered his co-pilot whilst in orbit. Mallory and his wife are suffering from a ‘space-sickness’, in which time appears to slow so that a few minutes of normal time seem to last all day. This condition was first observed in returned astronauts, then in other NASA personnel, and has now spread out to envelop the whole of Florida. Mallory hopes that by returning to the source of the sickness he can understand its true meaning:

The murder of the astronaut and the public unease that followed had marked the end of the space age, an awareness that man had committed an evolutionary crime by travelling into space, that he was tampering with the elements of his own consciousness. The fracture of that fragile continuum erected by the human psyche through millions of years had soon shown itself, in the confused sense of time displayed by the inhabitants of the towns near the space centre. Cape Kennedy and the whole of Florida itself became a poisoned land to be forever avoided …

As time slows, it seems to Mallory that the world is bathed in a bright light, with ‘photons backing up all the way to the sun’. The descriptions of surrounding objects resemble those in The Crystal World: a fountain turns into ‘a glass tree that shed an opalescent fruit onto his shoulders and hands’, and ‘the waves were no longer running towards the beach, and were frozen ruffs of icing sugar’.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

At the Cape, Hinton has collected a number of antique aircraft, apparently in an attempt to engineer his own escape from time:

We had to get out of time — that’s what the space programme was all about. … Flight and time, Mallory, they’re bound together. The birds have always known that. To get out of time we first need to learn to fly. That’s why I’m here. I’m teaching myself to fly, going back through all these old planes to the beginning. I want to fly without wings …

Hinton attacks Mallory from his aircraft, and Mallory realizes that his own real aim is to kill Hinton. They seek each other through the deserted Cape and abandoned suburbs, but eventually Hinton sets fire to his aircraft and, taking Anne Mallory with him, he climbs the Shuttle launch platform and steps off with her ‘into the light’. Knowing that time will have stopped for his wife and Hinton as they experience this final moment of flight, Mallory looks forward to his own ending — he plans to open the cage housing a tiger that was once part of a small zoo:

… without time the lion could at last lie down with the lamb. … The key to the tiger cage he held always in his hand. There was little time left to him now, the light-filled world had transformed itself into a series of tableaux from a pageant that celebrated the founding days of creation. In the finale every element in the universe, however humble, would take its place on the stage in front of him. … He would unlock the door soon … lie down with this beast in a world beyond time.

The other two stories repeat the formula, with variations. In ‘News from the Sun’ people who have been associated with the space-programme, or who watched the flights on TV, are suffering deep fugues that leave them unconscious and motionless for increasing periods each day. Some of the victims eventually learn to become conscious through these fugues and they then become aware of a world where objects are endlessly multiplied as their past, present and future selves become simultaneously present. The sickness in ‘Myths of the Near Future’ is characterized by a ‘reluctance to go out of doors, the abandonment of job, family and friends, a dislike of daylight, a gradual loss of weight and retreat into a hibernating self ‘ and in the later stages by a perception that time is slowing-down to an eventual frozen instant.

All three stories are remarkably similar. In each case, (i) the time distortions represent a psychic disorder caused by mankind attempting to leave the planet; (ii) each of the protagonists realizes that this change makes available to them a world where time no longer exists and all events — past and future — are simultaneously present; (iii) this new ‘world without time’ is characterized by a bright light; and (iv) the stories all include astronauts (or people who believe they are astronauts) and characters obsessed with flight, for example with micro-light planes, antique aircraft, and birds. Even minor elements are repeated: in all three stories the main protagonist has taken a long journey to or from Cape Kennedy once the psychological disorientation becomes apparent, and they each lose a considerable amount of weight as the condition progresses.

This repetition of themes in three stories in such a short space of time is rather puzzling, particularly as the concept of transcending time had already featured strongly in Ballard’s fiction in the early and mid-1960s. Why should he return to this theme in 1981-2? And why visit it three times in such a short period? In trying to understand this conundrum, it’s interesting to look at some of the comments that Ballard has made about his own creative activity, where he admits that the forces driving his imaginative processes are obscure, even to himself:

I just tend to write whatever comes mentally to hand, and what I find interesting at a particular time. These decisions as to what one’s going to write tend to be made somewhere at the back of one’s mind, so one can’t consciously say: ‘that’s what I’m going to write’. It doesn’t work out like that! (interview in ‘J. G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years’, 1976).

I’m barely aware of what is going on. Recurrent ideas assemble themselves, obsessions solidify themselves … (interview in ‘The Paris Review’, 1984).

I feel that the writer of fantasy has a marked tendency to select images and ideas which directly reflect the internal landscapes of his mind, and the reader of fantasy must interpret them on this level, distinguishing between the manifest content, which may seen obscure, meaningless or nightmarish, and the latent content, the private vocabulary of symbols drawn by the narrative from the writer’s mind (‘Time, Memory and Inner Space’, 1963).

If we take these comments at face value, then something within the landscape of Ballard’s mind was presumably driving him in the direction taken by these three stories from the early 1980s. Perhaps a clue is evident in his own personal situation. Following the death of his wife, Ballard had brought up his three young children on his own. His close involvement and the deep satisfaction he got from his family is evident in both his semi-autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women and his recent autobiography Miracles of Life. But by the late ’70s all three children had left home, and interviews at the time show the deep impact this had on him:

… the absence of those three children left a colossal vacuum in my life. … It is very strange … So I’ve been asking that question for at least a year — what the hell do I do now?’ (interview conducted in 1979 and published in J. G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1984)

I get up in the morning and the day just sort of stretches like the plains of Kansas, with not a speck on the horizon. Which is great, of course! (interview conducted in 1982 and published in Re/Search #8/9: J G Ballard, 1984)

And in The Kindness of Women, the fictionalized version of Ballard explains ‘I spent the whole of my adult life with children. Suddenly, when I’m fifty, there’s this colossal vacuum. Mothers feel the same way. Nature hasn’t provided a contingency plan — or, as Dick would say, nature’s contingency plan is death.’ So it isn’t surprising that Ballard’s unconscious creative processes should turn once again to the notion of time, and of time’s involvement with the creation of meaning in one’s life.

ABOVE: Artwork from Ambit for ‘News from the Sun’. Illustration by Mark Foreman.

But why the specific obsession with a ‘frozen time’? I think that to comprehend this, we have to go back to Ballard’s idea that reality is, at bottom, a construct of the human brain. This has long been has been one of his favourite themes in interviews, and here’s a typical example:

What I do have is the notion, which I take from modern experimental psychology, that the universe presented to us by our senses is a kind of ramshackle construct that happens to suit the central nervous system of an intelligent bipedal mammal with a rather short conceptual and physical range. We see rooms and people and have perceptions — but it’s all a construct (interview in ‘Rolling Stone’, 1987).

The roots of this idea seem to lie in Ballard’s boyhood in Shanghai and his early grasp of the notion that the everyday world is a sort of stage-set, as he describes in his autobiography Miracles of Life in a passage where he and his father enter a deserted nightclub:

[I] walked on tiptoe through the silent gaming rooms where roulette tables lay on their sides and the floor was covered with broken glasses and betting chips. Gilded statues propped up the canopy of the bars that ran the length of the casino, and on the floor ornate chandeliers cut down from the ceiling tilted among the debris of bottles and old newspapers. Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.

If our reality is a constructed reality, then this applies equally to our notion of time and those aspects of our lives that are closely connected with our sense of lived time, such as our memories, hopes, and ideals:

… the view of modern psychology [is] that the brain presents us with only a ramshackle view of reality, a partial construct imperfect in numerous ways, from the more trivial — the geometry of the rooms we inhabit — to the more serious — our sense of time, memory, our hopes, ideals and private mythologies (interview in ‘Impulse: The Magazine of Time and Space’, 1988).

And if our sense of lived time is a construct, then it becomes possible to conceive of an alternative form of reality that contains some form of timelessness or a non-linear time. But the source of this alternative notion of time must lie within ourselves, or as one of the characters in ‘Memories of the Space Age’ tells Mallory, ‘Doctor … The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head, not out here.’

Implicit in what Mallory refers to as ‘a world without time, an indefinite and unending present’ is the disappearance or metamorphosis of the future and of the past. The evanescence of the future is heralded in each of these three stories by the failure of the manned space programme and the resulting psychic disorientation, and is reflected in the landscapes, which are derelict or overgrown and largely deserted of inhabitants: ‘an immense silence of deserted marinas and shopping malls, abandoned citrus farms and retirement estates, silent ghettoes and airports.’ The shedding of the past can be seen in the loss of weight that occurs in those who experience time dislocation — as Mallory puts it, ‘he and Anne had each lost more than thirty pounds, as if their bodies were carrying out a re-inventory of themselves for the coming world without time.’ And the past explicitly withdraws in ‘Memories of the Space Age’:

Thankfully, as time evaporated, so did memory. He looked at his few possessions, now almost meaningless … The minutes were beginning to stretch, urged on by this eventless universe free of birds and aircraft. His memory faltered, he was forgetting his past, the clinic at Vancouver and its wounded children, his wife asleep in the hotel at Titusville, even his own identity.

But the stories do not represent the past and the future as disappearing completely. Instead they become available again in a new form of existence that brings past, present and future together simultaneously. In ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ this occurs explicitly through a process that is reminiscent of the crystallization of the universe that takes place in The Crystal World — the multiplication of objects so that all the different versions, past, present and future, exist at one and the same time:

The sun was annealing plates of copper light to his skin, dressing his arms and shoulders in a coronation armour. Time was condensing around him, a thousand replicas of himself from the past and future had invaded the present and clasped themselves to him. … The flow of light through the air had begun to slow, layers of time overlaid each other, laminae of past and future fused together. Soon the tide of photons would be still, space and time would set forever (‘Myths of the Near Future’).

ABOVE: Artwork from Ambit for ‘News from the Sun’. Illustration by Mark Foreman.

But sometimes, the merging of time is more indirect, as in ‘News from the Sun’ where Franklin describes himself as having a ‘premonition of the past’ and a ‘nostalgia for the future’, or in this passage from ‘Myths of the Near Future’:

There was a sense of stop-frame about the whole of his past life — his childhood and school–days, McGill and Cambridge, the junior partnership in Vancouver, his courtship of Elaine, together seemed like so many clips run at the wrong speed. The dreams and ambitions of everyday life, the small hopes and failures, were attempts to bring these separated elements into a single whole again. Emotions were the stress lines in this over–stretched web of events.

The essential thesis of these three stories is that the withdrawal or transfiguration of past and future should enable us to live in a more real and rewarding eternal present, and this new mode of being is described as transcending our everyday existence entirely. When Hinton and Anne Mallory step off the Shuttle gantry into empty space, they will continue to exist in an eventless eternity that others will perceive as merely a few seconds as they fall to the ground. As Dr. Mallory reflects,

It was curious that images of heaven or paradise always presented a static world, not the kinetic eternity one would expect, the roller-coaster of a hyperactive funfair, the screaming Luna Parks of LSD and psilocybin. It was a strange paradox that given eternity, an infinity of time, they chose to eliminate the very element offered in such abundance.

One of the underlying attractions of apprehending the simultaneity of all existence is that it will somehow enable us to transcend death. In ‘Myths of the Near Future’, Sheppard is convinced that his wife is still alive even though she has died, and explains: ‘Everything that’s ever happened, all the events that will ever happen, are taking place together. We can die, and yet still live, at the same time. … No one who has ever lived can ever really die.’ And in an interview, Ballard tells us why The Crystal World is one of his favourite novels: ‘the idea that time might condense like ice, that we might somehow escape from that flux of time that sweeps us towards the end … is intriguing’ (interview in SFX, 1996).

If we can put to one side the ecstatic descriptions in Ballard’s fiction, it becomes apparent that an eventless eternity is the predictable result of the emasculation of the past and the future. Without memories, hopes or ideals to give meaning to the events of our lives, we find merely a series of occurrences, and the present starts to blur into an endless procession. But if this is the case, then the nature of such a world-without-time is ambiguous — instead of being a life lived to the full, an endless present can instead be deadening and boring, a major concern in Ballard’s later writings:

Once you move to the suburbs, time stops. People measure their lives by consumer goods, the dreams that money can buy. I think that’s more dangerous. People have no loyalties anymore. … Maybe we’re going to live in an eventless future. In a hundred years, the world might be very, very boring. (interview in ‘The Face’, 1988)

That Ballard holds this two-fold view of an endless present is not surprising, given the ambiguity that runs through all his work. Responding to a comment by Hans Ulrich Obrist that ambiguity is central to his writings, Ballard enthusiastically agrees: ‘I hope everything I have written is ambiguous, reflecting the paradoxical faces that make up human nature.’ Given this ambivalence, it is best to view an eternal present as one of Ballard’s extreme metaphors, or as an example of his predictive mythologies:

which in a sense provide an operating formula by which we can deal with our passage through consciousness — our movements through time and space. … mythologies that you can actually live by (interview in Re/Search #8/9: J G Ballard, 1984).

These predictive mythologies can be utilized via our imagination, and in Ballard’s iconography the imagination is often symbolized by flight:

Deserted runways have a tremendous magnetic pull for me. … The concrete strip just beckons one into new realms. Indeed, any major airport in the world charges me with a powerful sense of inspiration: they offer new points of departure for the imagination (interview in ‘ZG Magazine’, 1988).

Imagination has special significance because our perception of reality is, for Ballard, an artificial construct, and more particularly a type of construct that may have been necessary when mankind was struggling for survival in a dangerous world but which is limiting and restricting in a society where external dangers are largely absent and the need is rather for an exploration of alternative possibilities. Hence it is to imagination that Ballard looks for help in understanding how we are now to live:

Don’t forget that man is, and has been for at least a million years, a hunting species surviving with difficulty in a terribly dangerous world. In order to survive, his brain has been trained to screen out anything but the most essential and the most critical. Watch that hillcrest! Beware of that cave mouth! Kill that bird! Dodge that spear! … But now the world is essentially far less dangerous. (interview in ‘Penthouse’, 1979)

Bearing in mind the difficulties that a wholly rational being would have in coping with a largely hostile environment, there must be enormous evolutionary advantages in possessing a powerful imagination, contrary to what one would assume, or the pressures of natural selection would long since have eliminated anyone handicapped by this confusing ability to invent an imaginary alternative to the world presented to us by our senses. And that, I take it, is the vital function which the imagination performs for the central nervous system and a brilliant stratagem for dealing with crucial limitations in the brain’s picture of reality. … The more we can engage our imaginations, therefore, the better, and the most important task for each of us is to test the imperfections of reality against the perfectibility of the dream. (interview in ‘Impulse: The Magazine of Time and Space’, 1988)

We can now see why symbols of flight — antique planes, gliders, birds — figure throughout these three stories. It is only by using our powers of imagination that we can work out what Ballard’s extreme metaphor might mean for us, how we might live in a manner other than that ordained by a linear time that ‘runs into the future like a narrow-gauge scenic railway’ as Ballard tellingly describes the chronology of our lives.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

In fact, at the end of ‘Myths of the Near Future’ the metaphor changes when the characters find that they can merge their past, present and future selves into a single body:

[Martinsen's] body was now dressed in a dozen glimmering images of himself, refractions of past and present seen through the prism of time. … [Sheppard] embraced the helpless doctor, searching for the strong sinews of the young student and the wise bones of the elderly physician. In a sudden moment of recognition, Martinsen found himself, his youth and his age merged in the open geometries of his face, this happy rendezvous of his past and future selves. … they would move on, to the towns and cities of the south, to the sleepwalking children in the parks, to the dreaming mothers and fathers embalmed in their homes, waiting to be woken from the present into the infinite realm of their time-filled selves.

There is no suggestion here of a transcendent and eternal existence within an instant of time. Instead, the present is re-established by incorporating the past and future within itself, and they once again become available to create a meaningful life.

So the continual struggle is to how to relate the present to past and future. If these relations become too rigid, then our understanding of reality becomes conservative and restrictive, a theme that occurs regularly in Ballard’s interview comments:

One needs to break the conventional enamel that encases everything. … All around us, in practically every aspect of our lives, decisions are being made for us to guarantee our safe passage through this world. … There’s a sort of constant struggle on a minute-by-minute basis throughout our lives, throughout every day; one needs to dismantle that smothering conventionalized reality that wraps itself around us. There’s a conspiracy, in which we play our willing part, just to stabilize the world we inhabit, or our small corner of it. One needs at the same time to dismantle that smothering set of conventions that we call everyday reality. (interview in ‘Re/Search #8/9: J G Ballard’, 1984)

The danger is that our memories, hopes and ideals act as conventions that stabilize our lives only too well. In reaction against this, we are driven towards the metaphor of a world without past or future, a world that is depicted in its most extreme form in Ballard’s ‘The Summer Cannibals’, one of the pieces that was included in The Atrocity Exhibition. The story concerns a visit by the protagonist (not named in this story, but I shall call him Travis) and his wife to a Mediterranean resort, the entire action taking place within a brief period of time — perhaps a couple of days. There’s much play on the way in which people’s lives are enervated at this type of resort: ‘exhausted by the sun, the resort was almost deserted’, ‘bodies … as inert as the joints of meat on supermarket counters’, and so on. Time passes, but nothing much happens, rather as in Ballard’s Vermilion Sands stories. This enervation is reflected in Travis’s relationship with his wife: ‘An enormous neutral ground now divided them, across which their emotions signalled like meaningless semaphores.’ And this neutral ground, which the sun opens up by bleaching away meaning, feelings, etc., is something that Travis can utilize — it opens up new vistas for him to explore. As meaning drains out of the resort and out of the lives of the people within it, the normal sense of time disappears. So the past, instead of being a history, becomes something that exists in our imaginations, and Travis can play around with his memories:

He remembered these pleasures: the conjunction of her exposed pubis with the polished contours of the bidet; the white cube of the bathroom quantifying her left breast as she bent over the handbasin; … her right hand touching the finger-smeared panel of the elevator control. Looking at her from the bed, he re-created these situations, conceptualizations of exquisite games.

And just as ‘the past’ disappears, so does ‘the future’, or at least that idea of the future as something that helps tie together our activities and lives. Instead, we have an open plain of endless possibilities — more exquisite games for Travis: ‘Was he playing an elaborate game with her, using their acts of intercourse for some perverse pleasure of his own?’

In a way, the absence of time passing, the lack of change, is reflected in the first and last paragraphs of ‘The Summer Cannibals’, both of which feature Travis’s wife waiting for him in the car as he wanders around on the beach. These two paragraphs, which bookend the story, are very similar — but are they two alternative versions of the same event? … or two different moments between which nothing much has changed? … or is there in no real difference between these two alternatives? And right at the end of the story, the disappearing footprints of the young man walking past Travis’s wife are symbolic of everything that may have happened: ‘she looked down at the imprints of his feet in the white pumice. The fine sand poured into the hollows, … [she sat] watching the last of the footprints vanish in the sand.’ The footprints just disappear, as if they were never there, vanishing to leave no trace. They have been erased just as surely as the events of the story. The past isn’t in the story at all, except in the memories that Travis plays with. And there’s no future referred to — the end paragraph is virtually identical to the first. So the short period of time in which the events of ‘The Summer Cannibals’ takes place is entirely self-contained — it only means as much or as little as Travis makes it mean.

‘The Summer Cannibals’ is one of Ballard’s extreme metaphors. However, if we turn from the fiction to reality, we see that we might be able to escape the conventionalizing effect of the past and future and live in a more congenial type of endless present, as Ballard did when bringing up his young children, such that one’s everyday life somehow ‘sits right’ with one’s memories and hopes without being determined by them. But (pace Ballard) time does not stand still — memories and hopes can always turn into constraints or into hollow catechisms, and the endless present can resolve into a mere series of events so that time stretches out in front like ‘the plains of Kansas’. This seems to me to be the sort of position that Ballard may have found himself in when he returned to the subject of time and wrote ‘News’, ‘Memories’, and ‘Myths’.

Ballard’s own resolution to these vicissitudes of time is hinted at in a contemporaneous vignette, ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******’ (1984), in which ‘B’ wakes up to a world totally deserted except for himself and the birds. After wandering around for some months and ascertaining that no-one else remains, he stocks up for the winter:

But his only visitors were the birds, and he scattered handfuls of rice and seeds on the lawn of his garden and on those of his former neighbours. Already he had begun to forget them, and Shepperton soon became an extraordinary aviary, filled with birds of every species. Thus the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work.

ABOVE: Artwork from Ambit for ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******’. Illustration by Mark Foreman.

+ ‘News from the Sun’, first published in Ambit #87, Autumn 1981.
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’, first published in Interzone #2, 1982.
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’, first published in F & SF, Oct. 1982.
+ ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******’, first published in Ambit #96, 1984.

ABOVE: Eltham Lido, by Gigi Cifali.

Curiously, the house we moved to had a drained swimming pool in its garden. It must have been the first drained pool I had seen, and it struck me as strangely significant in a way I have never fully grasped. My parents decided not to fill the pool, and it lay in the garden like a mysterious empty presence. I would walk through the unmown grass and stare down at its canted floor. I could hear the bombing and gunfire all around Shanghai, and see the vast pall of smoke that lay over the city, but the drained pool remained apart. In the coming years I would see a great many drained and half-drained pools, as British residents left Shanghai for Australia and Canada, or the assumed ‘safety’ of Hong Kong and Singapore, and they all seemed as mysterious as that first pool in the French Concession. I was unaware of the obvious symbolism that British power was ebbing away, because no one thought so at the time, and faith in the British Empire was at its jingoistic height.

J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

Here are some more Ballard-evoking images: drained swimming pools as photographed by Gigi Cifali in his Absence of Water series.

Via BLDGBLOG:

The photos here are all by Gigi Cifali, who originally trained as a topographer, from a series called “Absence of Water.” The images document the disused pools of London – and there are many more of these photos to be seen over at Polar Inertia or on Cifali’s own website.

I’m reminded, though, of a great line from J.G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun:

“Jim watched Mr. Maxted sway along the tiled verge of the empty swimming pool, curious to see if he would fall in. If Mr. Maxted was always accidentally falling into swimming pools, as indeed he always was, why did he only fall into them when they were filled with water?”

Why, indeed.

ABOVE: Erith Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

Royal, eyes almost closed, one hand gripping Laing’s shoulder, pointed towards the swimming-pool.

In the yellow light reflected off the greasy tiles, the long tank of the bone-pit stretched in front of them. The water had long since drained away, but the sloping floor was covered with the skulls, bones and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses. Tangled together where they had been flung, they lay about like the tenants of a crowded beach visited by a sudden holocaust.

Disturbed less by the sight of these mutilated bodies — residents who had died of old age or disease and then been attacked by wild dogs, Laing assumed — than by the stench, Laing turned away. Royal, who had clung so fiercely to him during their descent of the building, no longer needed him, and dragged himself away along the line of changing cubicles. When Laing last saw him, he was moving towards the steps at the shallow end of the swimming-pool, as if hoping to find a seat for himself on this terminal slope.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise (1975).

ABOVE: Uxbridge Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

For the next ten days the expedition pressed on down the New Jersey Turnpike, heading south-west towards Washington. The endless ribbon of the highway unwound into the haze, lined with mile after mile of abandoned cars and trucks. Each evening they left the road and spent the night in one of the hundreds of empty motels and country clubs along the route, resting around the drained swimming-pools that seemed to cover the entire continent.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

ABOVE: Weldstone Pool, by Gigi Cifali.

During the night the swimming-pool had drained itself. Jim had never seen the tank empty, and he gazed with interest at the inclined floor. The once mysterious world of wavering blue lines, glimpsed through a cascade of bubbles, now lay exposed to the morning light. The tiles were slippery with leaves and dirt, and the chromium ladder at the deep end, which had once vanished into a watery abyss, ended abruptly beside a pair of scummy rubber slippers.

J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (1984).

ABOVE: London Fields Lido, by Gigi Cifali.

Car parks surrounded a shopping mall lined with stores and restaurants, and I pointed with surprise to the first pedestrians we had seen, unloading their supermarket trolleys through the tail-doors of their vehicles. To the south of the plaza lay a marina filled with yachts and powerboats, moored together like a rnothballed fleet. An access canal led to the open sea, passing below a cantilever bridge that carried the coast road. A handsome clubhouse presided over the marina and its boatyard, but its terrace was deserted, awnings flared over the empty tables. The nearby sports club was equally unpopular, its tennis courts dusty in the sun, the swimming pool drained and forgotten.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (1996).

ABOVE: Flooded London, by Squint/Opera.

You don’t need me to tell you what these images evoke…

‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked after a pause. ‘The name of this city?’ When Kerans shook his head he said: ‘Part of it used to be called London; not that it matters…’

The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America. Impenetrable Mato Grossos sometimes three hundred feet high, they were a nightmare world of competing organic forms returning rapidly to their Paleozoic past, and the only avenues of transit for the United Nations military units were through the lagoon systems that had superimposed themselves on the former cities. But even these were now being clogged with silt and then submerged.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962.

Via De Zeen:

Film and media studio Squint/Opera has created a series of images depicting imaginary scenes in London in 2090, when rising sea levels have inundated the city. The Flooded London series depicts the city as a “tranquil utopia”. Five images will be on show at Medcalf Gallery in Clerkenwell, London from 20 June for a month, during the London Festival of Architecture. Exhibition details are on the festival website.

His name still echoed faintly in his ears as they began their search of the building. He took up his position at the stairwell at the centre of each corridor while Riggs and Macready inspected the apartments, keeping a look-out as they climbed the floors. The building had been gutted. All the floorboards had rotted or been ripped out, and they moved slowly along the tiled inlays, stepping warily from one concrete tie-beam to another.

Most of the plaster had slipped from the walls and lay in grey heaps along the skirting boards. Wherever sunlight filtered through, the bare laths were intertwined with creeper and wire-moss, and the original fabric of the building seemed solely supported by the profusion of vegetation ramifying through every room and corridor.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962.

Only a few feet from the surface, they drew closer, emerging from the depths like an immense intact Atlantis. First a dozen, then a score of buildings appeared to view, their cornices and fire-escapes clearly visible through the thinning refracting glass of the water. Most of them were only four or five storeys high, part of a district of small shops and offices enclosed by the taller buildings that had formed the perimeter of the lagoon.

Fifty yards away the first of the roofs broke surface, a blunted rectangle smothered with weeds and algae, across which slithered a few desperate fish. Immediately half a dozen others appeared around it, already roughly delineating a narrow street.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962.

ABOVE: ‘Joshua Says GO!’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A 30s twin-tail Lockheed Electra does the big sleep at Aviation Warehouse. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. Canon 20D.’

The photography of Troy Paiva treats us to canted visions of a crumbling, post-industrial America — decommissioned military bases, aircraft ‘boneyards’, abandoned desert towns. The scenarios are all shot at night and the work is presented straight out of the camera, mostly untouched by Photoshopping or other post-processing techniques. Troy uses available light, such as moonlight or sodium light (the latter of course plentiful in the modern-day archaeological ruins he haunts), but he also uniquely marks the shots with his light-painting skills (the introduction of hand-held, hand-applied light during the exposure) and the unearthly effects of red, green and blue-gelled strobe flashes. The cumulative effect is startling: like stills from a David Lynch film in a parallel universe in which Lynch, instead of adapting Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart for his twisted desert noir masterpiece, had chosen Ballard’s Vermilion Sands instead.

Simon Sellars

NOTE: Although I have tried my best to include a representative selection of Troy’s photos, I found it almost impossible to do justice to the scope, beauty and sheer volume of his work. If after reading this interview you find yourself wanting more examples, my advice is to start either at Troy’s official site or his flickr page and work your way from there.

I had arrived in Vermilion Sands three months earlier. A retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken leg and the prospect of never flying again… I found a shallow basin among the dunes… The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like building to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’, first published in 1967, collected in Vermilion Sands (1971).

SIMON: Troy, when we first talked about your photos, you said, ‘People constantly refer to my photography as “Ballardian”.’ I can certainly see the connections, especially with Vermilion Sands and its sense of decadent ruin, a lurid, near-future civilisation lost in the desert sands. But is Ballard actually an influence on your work?

TROY: No. I came to him much later. I enjoyed the Vermilion Sands stories very much when I read them a couple of years ago and I can see why people connect my work with his writing. There is that sense of desolation and isolation, the fetishism of decay and destruction and a general sense of being outside the realm of normal society, as well as the melancholia of straggling on after everything has ended.

Same thing happened with Kerouac’s On the Road. After reading it recently I thought, ‘Wow, no wonder people keep saying that to me.’ Much of my photography stems from massive, epic road trips that criss-cross the southwest, where I cover thousands of miles in a couple of very surreal days. The mythology of The Road figures in a lot of my work. I guess these similarities show that human experience is roughly the same for all of us, we just have different ways of expressing it. See also Philip K. Dick.

The books of my formative years were George Stewart’s pastoral apocalypse classic Earth Abides, Hunter S. Thompson’s surrealist freak-out, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Stand, Stephen King’s pop-epic story of The End. Those three books kinda say it all about where my approach to the road, abandonment and the ‘post-everything’ world lies. And the movie Vanishing Point – that encapsulates my own road-trip mythology perfectly.

HENRY: ‘And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The last American hero, the electric Shinta, the demigod, the super driver of the Golden West.’

TROY: ‘And beans, lotsa beans.’ Man, I love that movie. It’s totally what the desert is about for me.

ABOVE: ‘Color Television’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Behind an abandoned restaurant in the sleepy Mojave Desert town of Yermo, CA. The density of the sky was caused by the October Fires in SoCal. You could taste every breath. Night, full moon 2 minute exposure, natural, yellow and red-gelled strobe and flashlights. Composite of 2 images.’

HENRY: There are other things your work brings to mind, like the Mojave Desert Phone Booth.

TROY: Love it. Wish I’d had a chance to shoot it! I got lost on a series of endless dirt roads trying to find it, many years ago. Almost got stuck and had to give up. It’s been gone for at least five years now.

SIMON: What exactly is it about the desert that appeals?

TROY: I just love the expansiveness and isolation – it’s primal and uncompromising. I love that you can go for days without talking to anyone. It’s a land of outcasts and oddballs, where non-conformists can thrive. An incredible volume of American mythology is based on the desert and Western expansion, from the Gold Rush to Route 66. I’ve even heard my photography described as an epitaph for the mythology of the American West.

Dr Paul Ricci was thinking: So this is New York – or was. Greatest city of the twentieth century, here you heard the heart-beat of international finance, industry and entertainment. Now it’s as remote from the real world as Pompeii or Persepolis. It’s a fossil, my God, preserved here on the edge of the desert like one of those ghost towns in the Wild West. Did my ancestors really live in these vast canyons? They came on a cattle boat from Naples in the 1890s, and a century later went back to Naples on a cattle boat. Now I’m making another stab at it.

Still, the place has possibilities, all sorts of dormant things might be lying here, waiting to be roused.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

SIMON: Your bio says your work is about ‘the evolution and eventual abandonment of the communities, structures and social iconography spawned during this country’s 20th century western expansion’. How did it come to be this way?

TROY: It’s simply who I am. When I was 13 my family went on a road trip, one of many, and we somehow found ourselves bouncing down 15 miles of bad dirt road to the classic ‘wild west’ ghost town of Bodie, arguably the most authentic ghost town in America. Today Bodie is kept in a state of ‘arrested decay’ and is a major tourist destination. Much of the road is paved and the parking lot is filled with tour buses, and in the summer the town is crawling with thousands of tourists from around the world. But back in the early 70s you could drive right into the centre of town and park. When we climbed out of the car we found we were the only ones there! I wandered that town alone for hours, slack-jawed at the thought that people would just walk away from furnished houses and businesses, a whole city, and never come back. I was hooked for life.

ABOVE: ‘Texaco Marine’ by Troy Paiva. ‘North Shore Marina, Salton Sea, 2001. Most, if not all, the letters are gone by now. Night, 100% full moon/star light, 8 minutes, f5.6.’

SIMON: I understand it’s your Salton Sea work that gets most of the Vermilion Sands comparisons.

TROY: Yes. The Salton Sea is an enormous, accidentally created salt lake in a remote corner of the SoCal desert. In the 50s developers built elaborate resorts and golf courses around its shores and the department of interior stocked it with game fish. By the 60s it had become an idyllic combination of Lake Tahoe and Palm Springs, half outdoorsman’s paradise, half retreat for the Hollywood elite. By the 70s, however, two years of record rain caused massive floods and the lake, which has no outlet, began to fester and decay. The smell became unbearable as massive algae blooms died off. Anyone who could afford to move away did. By the 90s fish and birds were dying on a biblical scale – in the millions – triggered by the algae blooms. It’s a horrible, filthy place rimmed with rotten modernist resorts, marinas and trailer parks (most of which have been torn down now), and decaying dead fish and birds. Today the Salton Sea feels very much like the epicentre for the end of the world, a poster child for mankind’s failure to tame nature.

Ballardian for sure!

Ronnov-Jessen: [In your novella 'The Ultimate City'] one could say that the dynamism represented by New York is actually the dynamism of decay.

Ballard: No, I don’t accept that. The city is abandoned, and with it, suspended in time, is a whole set of formulae for expressing human energy, imagination, ambition. The clock has stopped, but it will be possible for the boy to start it up again, just as in the novel Hello America where the young hero does precisely the same — except he attempts to do it on a continental level.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Against Entropy’, a 1984 interview with Peter Ronnov-Jessen.

ABOVE: ‘Precis’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A flipped Mitsubishi Precis, run over by a tank, in the abandoned base housing at George AFB near Victorville, CA. There were several smashed cars left in strategic lines of sight used for infantry cover during wargames exercises. The engine block in this thing was crushed like an egg. Shot March 2001, 160T film. Night, about 8 minutes, full moon, but overcast, yellow and purple-gelled strobe-flash.’

HENRY: Do you think your photos suggest a cryptic ‘signs of passing’ of American Culture from the world stage?

TROY: I suppose it can’t help but be interpreted that way‚ but I must also say the rest of the world has more ruins and debris left behind than America does. The internet is overflowing with amazing photography shot in the abandoned places of the 21st century. Spend an hour Googling ‘urban exploration’ and you’ll see that the culture is exploding worldwide, so whilst you got the concept right, it’s important to see it as a human, post-industrial thing rather than purely American.

UrbEx is as old as mankind. Humans have always been obsessed with both building and exploration. I’m sure primitive man explored the abandoned caves of his ancestors too. We’re drawn to ruins. It’s just how we’re wired as a species. Whereas the 20th century saw an unprecedented worldwide explosion of construction, by the dawn of the 21st century much of this expansion had failed or become obsolete, leaving the world littered with an amazing array of every type of ruins imaginable. Today we are experiencing a true golden age of abandonment.

SIMON: You describe it as a ‘culture’. That suggests it’s more than simply the illicit thrill of sneaking into abandoned or forbidden territory.

TROY: Yes. UrbEx, or Urban Exploration, is the pastime of visiting TOADS (temporary, obsolete, abandoned and derelict spaces), but not for scientific, anthropological or nefarious purposes. It’s about absorbing the atmosphere and wabi sabi soul of these places. A ‘finding beauty in decay’ aesthetic. I visit these lapsed spaces for several of the same reasons that normal people visit a serene mountain glen: the soul-cleansing quietude and the sense of feeling very small in a big universe. But ultimately it is an entirely different sensibility. Where most people see waste and blight in TOADS, Urban Explorers see elegant devolution and the weight of time.

Found the man Traven. A strange derelict figure, hiding in a bunker in the deserted interior of the island. He is suffering from severe exposure and malnutrition, but is unaware of this or, for that matter, of any other events in the world around him … He maintains that he came to the island to carry out some scientific project — unstated — but I suspect that he understands his real motives and the unique role of the island … In some way its landscape seems to be involved with certain unconscious notions of time, and in particular with those that may be a repressed premonition of our own deaths. The attractions and dangers of such an architecture, as the past has shown, need no stressing …

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964).

HENRY: Ballard has a strangely acute, Triassic sense of ‘deep time’ in his fiction‚ especially in short stories like ‘The Terminal Beach’. Similarly, in your book Lost America, you wrote, ‘The stars pinwheeling overhead and clouds smearing across the sky mirrored the compression of time created by the relentless pace of the trip.’ You said you were seeking to ‘heighten the unreality’ of these bizarre, spectral non-places.

TROY: It is a different reality. UrbEx night photography is very far removed from normal life, and my goal is to accentuate this surreal, otherworldly atmosphere in the work. One of the big attractions of night photography is this weird time-space distortion thing. Most of the night shooters I know are philosophical about the process. The exposures are minutes long, giving you time to sit in the dark and absorb the scene. Regardless of whether you are shooting cranes in an abandoned shipyard, or you’re on the top of a windswept mountain shooting thousand year old trees, it’s a wonderfully zen, contemplative experience.

ABOVE: ‘Hot Seat 2′ by Troy Paiva. ‘Shot at the abandoned Fort Ord Army Base in Monterey, CA. I recently learned that most (soon to be all) of the barracks and entire laundry have recently been bulldozed. Hundreds of buildings. Gone. Night, full moon, pink and green-gelled strobe-flash, 3-4 minute exposure.’

HENRY: You must get scared sometimes.

TROY: I don’t really worry about stuff very much. I have yet to see a ghost or the undead, although I’ve had thousands of weird experiences. I’ve shot in many supposedly haunted locations and seen and heard things that some people would pass off as paranormal, but nothing that couldn’t be attributed to wind, settling or vermin in the walls. What I have seen a lot of are big poisonous spiders, three-storey drop offs into the yawning darkness with no railings, copper thieves, rattlesnakes, rotten floors and wasted teenage vandals. I’ve come out of buildings crawling with spiders (I’ve had some very bad spider bites over the years), missed a rattlesnake bite by inches and been chased back to the car by a pack of wild dogs. I’ve been run off by crazy, desert-rat property owners racking shotguns. I’ve been swarmed by a heavily armed platoon of border agents in southern Arizona while I was shooting in a pet cemetery. I’ve had countless cuts and bruises and sprained and twisted ankles, and I once gave myself an excruciating second-degree burn while light painting with fireworks in a sandstorm.

Doing this is a whole lot of fun, but there are a lot of very real ways to get hurt or killed. The dangerous aspect of UrbEx night photography is just not something I dwell on. If I did I’d never leave the house.

SIMON: In Lost America you wrote about coming across a sacrificial altar used in an occult ceremony.

TROY: Yeah, that was nasty. They had sacrificed a sheep on a makeshift altar in an abandoned Air Force fire station in a remote corner of the Mojave desert. Blood and entrails were smeared everywhere, lots of evil graffiti about how much fun it is to kill. It was a miserable sight. Sad.

SIMON: You said it was part of the ‘growing evidence of downright creepy stuff’ you’ve encountered. Are you implying that this kind of activity is on the rise?

TROY: Is it on the rise, or has it always been there, bubbling away under the surface? I don’t have the answer for that. Remember what I said earlier about the desert being the last place where oddballs can thrive? Some people are just bigger oddballs than others, what can I tell you?

HENRY: I enjoy reading your interior highway dialogues [Troy wrote 12,000 words to accompany the photos in Lost America]. You should definitely do more existential travel essays – you seem to have a feel for it.

TROY: Thanks, but I clearly don’t have as much to offer as a writer that I do as a photographer. Urban Exploration needs a new young writer, this generation’s version of Lester Bangs or Hunter S. Thompson, who can bring it into a modern pop-culture context. I’m not that writer, but I’ll gladly play the photographic role of Ralph Steadman.

ABOVE: ‘Danger Zone’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Building 4900, abandoned. Decommissioned Fort Ord Army Base. It’s all in the details. Shot 1/07, night- totally dark space, red-gelled strobe and ungelled strobe through fenced room.’

SIMON: Do you know about the recent hysteria in Britain, with people being questioned and harassed by police for using a camera in public places under suspicion of terrorism? There has been a huge backlash from ordinary people demanding the right to take pictures in public without being branded a terrorist.

TROY: I’ve heard rumblings about that sort of thing here too, especially in big cities. No question, the climate for photographers has changed since 9/11. The police have all of us on a shorter leash. Here in western America everything is spread out though, so it’s much easier to fall between the cracks if you get out of the big cities. That’s why I like shooting in rural locations. You are a lot less likely to be hassled by the police or unsavoury characters.

HENRY: Ballard has described Shanghai as ‘cruel and lurid, polluted and exciting’. Except for ‘cruel’ this seems an apt description of your photography (I find your work too surreal to be genuinely malicious). Do you feel this same kind of frantic, otherworldly rush as you travel the land in search of… of what, exactly?

TROY: Ghosts. Not Hollywood movie ghosts-actors under sheets waving their arms, but the ghosts of technology, a slice of amazing human history that is already being forgotten as we rush headlong towards… whatever the hell it is we are rushing towards. I don’t believe in ghosts in the traditional sense, but these places carry a spiritual weight that is unlike occupied places or nature. The stillness and atmosphere, especially alone at night, can be an emotionally overwhelming experience. No question, it is a rush.

ABOVE: ‘Canted’ by Troy Paiva. ’1959 Buick at a nameless high desert junkyard near Lake Los Angeles, CA. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon purple and green-gelled strobe-flash. Big and rusty.’

SIMON: Is America really changing as rapidly as your work suggests?

TROY: Yes, it’s changing faster and faster. America is all about speed and ‘the new’ so we’re always replacing things that don’t really need replacing. It’s interesting how the places and objects I find have changed over the years. Twenty years ago it was all about the debris left behind by the finned atomic-age, but now the focus has shifted to the debris of the 70s and 80s: junkyard minivans and wide-body airliners are replacing the big-finned station wagons and 707s. Disposable plastic replacing chromed steel.

Who knows where it’s headed? Surely we’re into another period of contraction in the West as gas tops $4 a gallon, which only means junkyards filled with giant SUVs and more abandonments to explore, but I have no idea where it will ultimately end up.

When Los Angeles is forgotten, probably what will remain will be the huge freeway system. I’m certain the people in the future — long after the automobile has been forgotten — will regard them as enigmatic and mysterious monuments which attested to the high aesthetic standards of the people that built them. In the same way that we look back on the pyramids or the mausoleums in a huge Egyptian necropolis as things of great beauty — we’ve forgotten their original function. It’s all a matter of aesthetics. I think that highways for the most part are beautiful. I prefer concrete to meadow.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

SIMON: How did you get interested in night photography?

TROY: In 1989 I was working as a designer/illustrator for a major toy company, drawing and painting every day in a heavily art-directed environment. After several years of that I lost any sense of the artistic fulfilment I was originally getting from the job. The last thing I wanted to do was draw and paint at home too, so I was desperate to find a new personal creative outlet. At the time my brother Tom was a full time photography student at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. One of his classes was in night photography. Being my brother, he knew I’d be fascinated by night shooting on a conceptual level, so he snuck me along to some lectures and shoots with the class in the decaying industrial sections of SF. It instantly dawned on me that this was the perfect way to photograph the abandoned roadside towns I was already exploring. After one trip to the desert to shoot at night I became totally obsessed and consumed by it.

ABOVE: ‘Alameda Corridor’ by Tom Paiva.

SIMON: Do you see any similarities with your brother Tom’s work?

TROY: When we were both learning the ropes in night shooting we frequently shot at night together. Now Tom lives in Los Angeles and he has a commercial photography business shooting large format architectural and industrial work. Living 500 miles apart, we seldom get the chance to shoot together anymore. Tom’s aesthetic is the complete opposite of mine; he doesn’t light paint, he doesn’t do the UrbEx-style locations, and his complex and meticulous – and ultimately gorgeous – large-format work is the exact opposite of my quick and dirty, guerrilla-style shooting. My compositional style tends towards a pop-surrealist, melodramatic and cartoony look, whereas his is a more stately and formalist style. His work is cool and elegant, mine hot and visceral. Yes, we’re both night photographers, but our styles couldn’t be more different. We’re very careful to avoid doing similar work specifically because we are both named ‘T. Paiva’ and we both make a conscious effort to avoid stepping on each other’s artistic toes. One way we’re similar though is that we’re both loners, but I think that is a trait that runs strong in most night shooters. It’s funny to watch a group of night photographers descend on a location – they usually say something like ‘meet you here at 1am’ and head off in opposite directions.

SIMON: Who else can you recommend in the field?

TROY: Jan Staller, Richard Misrach, Michael Kenna and Steve Fitch for sure. Studying the lighting work of O. Winston Link, William Lesch and Chip Simons back in the late 80s was really important for me, too. I’d sit there for hours, deconstructing their images trying to figure out how they lit their subjects. But maybe I owe more to David Lynch, Roger Deakins, Vittorio Storaro, Juan Ruiz Anchía, Emmanuel Lubezki, Tim Burton and a trillion other movie artists. I watch a lot more movies than I read photo books.

SIMON: What kind of equipment do you use?

TROY: I shot on film from 1989 to 2004 using cheap, outdated flea-market 35mm gear. It felt right for me to be shooting this forgotten junk with junk. This old work has a Holga-esque, toy-camera lo-fi quality that many find endearing today. I guess I was unintentionally ahead of the curve there too. I stopped shooting for a year in 2004 as the film era fizzled out, frustrated by lab closures, the lack of quality film processing and the low yield of acceptable work with my ancient equipment. In 2005 I moved to digital once I saw that camera technology had advanced enough to allow me to do noise-free time exposures. I now shoot with a Canon 20D and a 12-24mm Tokina zoom lens. I use a heavy, solid Slik tripod because I do a lot of work in wind and rough conditions and I need as stable a platform for the camera as possible. Regrettably, I was forced away from the ‘shooting junk with junk’ ethos by changing technology, but with the 20D already being superseded by several newer models in the past few years, maybe the 20D is already ‘outdated junk’ gear too.

ABOVE: ‘Speedlines’ by Troy Paiva. ‘Mid ’70s Chevy Monte Carlo at the Pearsonville, California Junkyard. This is the last of the Pearsonville work, I wanna try to head back soon tho. Night, 2 minute exposure, full moon, blue and green-gelled flashlight.’

SIMON: You’ve described your technique as ‘low cost/high impact lighting’. Is it therefore accessible for amateurs and people beginning to experiment with photography?

TROY: Absolutely. The advent of digital photography and the ability to chimp the shot on the back of your camera as you work has revolutionized night photography and light painting. In the film era you could shoot a whole roll of film and not know that the leader on the film never got picked up by the sprocket, let alone that your exposures were incorrect or your lighting was not bright enough.

All my lighting is done with a single 20 year old Vivitar 285 strobe flash and a collection of flashlights from a tiny keychain LED to a 1,000,000 candlepower spotlight. I have a set of theatrical lighting gels cut to small swatches that I just hold over the light source. Because the exposures are minutes long, I have plenty of time to do multiple flash pops and take my time with my flashlight work. Observers are often surprised by my low-tech lighting technique, asking ‘Is that really all there is to it?’ I have to keep it simple because this is frequently a guerrilla-style of photography. Travelling light is critical, so all my gear except the tripod fits in a small daypack, allowing me to get in, set up, shoot and get out quickly.

You can buy a flash like mine second-hand for $50. All of my flashlights could be bought at any drugstore like Target or Walmart. Every halfway-large city has at least one theatrical supply store where you can buy gel material. It costs about $10 a sheet. The reason for not trying light painting is not because of cost! Look at any of the myriad night photography or light-painting groups at a photo-sharing site like flickr and prepare to be overwhelmed with amateurs doing this kind of work in all sorts of locations. It’s everywhere now. I seem to have created a Frankenstein.

SIMON: Do you work fast?

TROY: I work incredibly fast compared to other night shooters. A lot of that is a product of having almost 20 years of experience, but I am a seat-of-the-pants type of artist in any media. The less thinking and planning and fussing over the piece, the more relaxed and natural it will be.

It’s kind of like a pianist playing a song with thousands of notes without sheet music: if they think about every note, they can’t possibly play the song. Rather, they turn off the conscious part of their mind and just let it flow. Same for painters and other artists. It’s no different for photography. The more you think, plan and try to get the shot, the more likely it will elude you.

ABOVE: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva. ‘The YESCO sign boneyard, Las Vegas, NV. Shot May, 2000. Night, 160 Tungsten film, full moon, sodium and mercury vapor lights, red-gelled strobe flash. That’s the Luxor hotel spotlight. Legendary location seen in many TV shows and movies containing hundreds of old signs. Almost everything here was donated and moved to the Las Vegas Neon Museum across town shortly after I shot here, this lot was turned into more manufacturing/warehouse space.’

Had they any idea that Las Vegas was defended by a rag-tag army of children? In an attempt to blind their camera lenses, Manson continued to turn up the electric power flowing into the city. The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incandescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

SIMON: Funnily enough, given that your signature style is this unnaturally vivid primary-colour palette, I always picture purples and reds when I think of Vermilion Sands, more so Ballard’s Hello America. The gels you use irradiate your scenery – for me it really does evoke the near-future sheen of Hello America‘s abandoned United States, in which whole cities are buried in the desert, a vast continent paved over with accreted hyperconsumerism. But in photography at least, this seems an unusual approach to take with urban ruins – many would rather focus on the grey, rusting aspects of abandoned towns. Perhaps, like Ballard, you are breathing new life into these ruins, recombining them in new and unexpected ways.

TROY: Yes, you nailed it. Most UrbEx photography is a pure documentation of locations weathered to dreary and monochromatic greys and browns, but I’m taking it someplace else entirely by reanimating these places with light. Some say I’m bringing a festive, circus-like atmosphere to these dead places. It’s done in a sort of Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’ spirit. My colour choices are usually predicated on the actual colour of the subject and location, not because of some premeditated ‘I must use green tonight’ mentality.

I see it as embracing the idea of death rather than fearing it. It’s about accepting it and having fun with this darker side of the human condition. My work tends to inspire melancholia, especially in older people, because they remember these places from their youth. It reminds them of their own mortality, but I think that palpable sense of transience and loss in these places is actually exciting and inspiring rather than sad or futile. I suspect that feeling runs strong in many urban explorers.

Personally, I’m not that opposed to pollution – I think the transformation of the old landscape by concrete fields and all that isn’t necessarily bad by definition. I feel there’s a certain beauty in looking at a lake that has a bright metallic scum floating on top of it. A certain geometric beauty in a cone of china clay, say, four hundred yards high, suddenly placed in the middle of the rural landscape. It’s all a matter of a certain aesthetic response. Some people find highways, cloverleaf junctions and overpasses and multi-storey car-parks ugly, chiefly because they are made of concrete. But they are not. Most of them are structures of great beauty.

J.G. Ballard, ‘How to Face Doomsday without Really Dying’, a 1974 interview with Carol Orr.

HENRY: Ballard has said that his fiction is the ‘dissection of a deep pathology’. Do you also see your own work as a kind of surgical procedure, laying bare the arid and often post-apocalyptically tinged dreamscapes of the USA in all its mythical glory? Or is it more intimate, personal and emotional than that?

TROY: Jeez, these are hard questions. It is a very personal and emotional process for me. It is an artistic process more than an intellectual one. My photography is about these places as they are now, not as they were. It’s not socioeconomic commentary, an anti-technology or anti-military-waste rant, or a warning about rampant consumerism and conspicuous consumption, though it has been interpreted as such by others. Put simply, I love these places. I am laying bare this rotten underbelly, but I’m doing it because these places simply move me, not necessarily because of what they were, but because of what they are now. It’s all about the atmosphere and feeling, and I try to enhance this surreal vibe with my time exposures and light painting.

ABOVE: The cover of Paiva’s Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration, published by Chronicle Books.

SIMON: I see that Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG has written the foreword to your forthcoming book, Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration. As we’ve previously seen, Geoff shares a Ballardian approach to architecture and urban exploration.

TROY: My editor at Chronicle Books introduced me to Geoff. He was a last-second addition to the project when my original essayist fell through at the 11th hour. Geoff immediately ‘got it’ and wrote a very eloquent and flattering forward, quoting from The Atrocity Exhibition among several other books. I enjoy Geoff’s blog tremendously, especially when the subject of ‘the philosophy and aesthetics of abandonment’ comes up.

Paiva’s images of airplane graveyards, in particular, are all the more evocative and gripping when you consider that his father was a flight engineer, hopping planes from country to country. In his book The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G. Ballard describes a surreal landscape of crashed bombers, abandoned air warfare ranges, and disused runways. He refers to such images as ‘the nightmare of a grounded pilot,’ or ‘the suburbs of Hell,’ a ‘University of Death,’ across which people wander, stunned by the ruins all around them.

Geoff Manaugh, foreword to Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration.

SIMON: Tell us more about the book.

TROY: It’s broken down into five chapters: ‘Byron Hot Springs Hotel’, about an abandoned early 20th century resort; ‘16th Street Station’, about a derelict Beaux Arts inner city train station; ‘Decommissioned’, which covers over a dozen various abandoned military and industrial complexes; ‘Desert’, about the abandoned roadsides of the desert southwest; and ‘Boneyard’, a high-desert graveyard comprised of hundreds of junk aircraft.

While it’s as similar to Lost America as you’d expect two volumes of ‘light-painted night photography in abandoned places’ to be, this new one is about specific locations rather than general overviews of types of places. I have the first production copy sitting on the desk in front of me and it really looks sharp. It’s a much higher-quality piece than Lost America. The layout and design is much more sophisticated and refined and the print quality is a vast improvement. I’m frankly floored by it and I’m my own worst critic, so I’m pretty optimistic that other people are going to be floored by it too.

SIMON: What sort of research do you do, in terms of finding out sites to visit and photograph?

TROY: I drive around in the desert and scout locations. I have a collection of old road maps from the 50s, which I’ve studied at length. It’s fascinating to see whole towns on those maps that no longer exist. In the last few years I’ve had a lot of email from people telling me about great locations and I’ve been acting on some of these tips with great results. I’ve also been shooting with a lot of local UrbEx photographers who have introduced me to some spectacular spots very close to home.

ABOVE: ‘Wind Slice’ by Troy Paiva. ’1930s airliner in storage at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled flash. 2-3 minutes.’

He welcomed this journey into a familiar land, zones of twilight. At dawn, after driving all night, they reached the suburbs of Hell. The pale flares from the petrochemical plants illuminated the wet cobbles. No one would meet them there. His two companions, the bomber pilot at the wheel in the faded flying suit and the beautiful young woman with radiation burns, never spoke to him… Who were they, these strange twins – couriers from his own unconscious? For hours they drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The billboards multiplied around them…

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1970).

SIMON: And your favourite shoot so far?

TROY: The aircraft boneyards are still my favourites. I’m an airline brat so I grew up around planes. There is nothing that can prepare you for walking up to half of a 747 laying on its belly in the sand. It’s just epic. I shot the derelict ocean liner ‘S.S. Independence’ earlier this year, days before it left to be towed to the breaker beaches of Asia. That was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime shoot.

SIMON: Do you have a desire to shoot outside of America?

TROY: Oh sure: the abandoned industrial cities of Eastern Russia, Gunkanjima – that completely abandoned island city in Japan – the half-finished hotels of the Sinai, the abandoned Formula 1 racetrack at Reims, France… the list goes on and on. Realistically, though, there is more than enough in the American Southwest to shoot for a lifetime.

It’s mainly a money issue. Being a freelance artist in the 21st century is a low-budget lifestyle. Still, with a few deep-pocket patrons I’d be happily winging my way across the globe next week!

Night Vision: The Art of Urban Exploration is shipping on 2 July, 2008 and is available for preorder via Chronicle Books and Amazon.com.

ABOVE: ‘Clipped and Headless’ by Troy Paiva. ‘A mutilated Delta 727 fuselage on its belly at Aviation Warehouse in El Mirage, CA, a Mojave Desert aircraft boneyard that services the film industry as well as recycles aircraft parts. Night, full moon, red-gelled strobe flash. 2-3 minute exposure.’

..:: MORE INFORMATION
+ Troy’s official site
+ Troy’s Lost America site
+ Troy’s flickr stream
+ Design Shed, Troy’s freelance design and illustration site

Illustration by John Coulthart.

WINNER
Ben Slater; ‘Vista 8′

JOHN: Monochrome location scouting inside a high-rise hotel that looks half-finished. Remnants of an affair litter the piece: photographs, a high heel and the cutting to two cars so close together it would be difficult not to predict a Crash. As Christopher Brookmyre said, beware half-finished places, you know, the Death Star, Jurassic Park, Nakatomi Plaza…

SIMON: Ben’s film, shot among the Vista 8 high-rise in Singapore, seems to me like it’s recording the last moments of a suicide. You chance upon a mobile phone discarded in the high-rise’s courtyard; you press ‘play’, and this is what you find… I do like the snatched inclusion of Bowie’s man-machine classic, ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’.

MORE ENTRIES BELOW…

I’d like to organize a Festival of Home Movies! It could be wonderful — thousands of the things… You might find an odd genius, a Fellini or Godard of the home movie, living in some suburb. I’m sure it’s coming… Using modern electronics, home movie cameras and the like, one will begin to retreat into one’s own imagination. I welcome that…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

We had eight entries in our little competition for 1-minute-or-less films shot on cameraphones, modelled after Ballard’s 1984 call for a ‘festival of home movies’. A reminder of the requirements:

+ Shoot a film using your mobile phone’s video function, no more than one minute in duration, and using no post-production or processing — the film must be shot entirely ‘in camera’.
+ The theme: anything at all to do with either one or both of the Collins English Dictionary definitions of ‘Ballardian’:

BALLARDIAN: (adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

Mounting this exercise was hugely enjoyable for me and I was delighted to discover some real gems among the eight. I have been inspired by those Ballard ‘home movie’ quotes ever since I first read them years ago, and just the very the idea of unearthing ‘a Fellini or Godard of the suburbs’ has always excited (and humoured) me. So have we found one? Perhaps not. But we just may have discovered, finally, what lies in the angle between two walls…. (not even John Foxx, you may recall, could crack that conundrum).

To determine a winner, John Rivers from HarperCollins assigned points to each film, as did I. We then combined our rankings. The result is that Ben Slater, with ‘Vista 8′, came out on top. Ben wins a copy of Miracles of Life, plus these HarperCollins reissues: Millennium People, The Drought, The Crystal World, The Drowned World and The Unlimited Dream Company.

The runner-up is Pablo Sgarbi from Brazil, with ’120 Days of an Angle Between Two Walls’ (see below), and he receives a copy of Miracles. Congratulations to Ben and Pablo, and many thanks to all entrants and to everyone who supported and promoted the festival. Extra special thanks to HarperCollins UK for getting behind the idea, and to JGB for everything: always and of course.

Next year, who knows? Perhaps we’ll get entrants to simulate the filmed ratissages in Super-Cannes, or Bobby Crawford’s home porno movies in Cocaine Nights…

Here now are the remaining entries direct to you from BallardoTube, the Net’s only dedicated Ballard TV channel, where ‘history is just a first-draft screenplay’ (according to JGB in ‘The Greatest TV Show On Earth’), and where ‘premium subscribers can experience transexualism, paedophilia, terminal syphilis, gang-rape, and bestiality (choice: German Shepherd or Golden Retriever)’, as decreed by JGB in ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’.

RUNNER UP
Pablo Sgarbi; ’120 Days of An Angle Between Two Walls’

JOHN: A voice simulator spews forth graphic prose like a poetry machine from Vermillion Sands. Juxtaposed with images of ordinariness, a ceiling corner, a kettle, a cup of coffee. Reminding us what lies in the dark psyches of people everyday.

SIMON: Beautiful and hilarious: a robot reads a passage from the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, dispassionately intoning squirting buttocks and jets of blood, while common household objects ‘star’ on the screen: those elusive wall angles, a coffee cup, and so on. In its juxtaposition of extreme and violent sex with banal home appliances, this is perhaps the most ‘Ballardian’ film of them all. I love this entry a lot.

..:: Remaining entries (not ranked; in alphabetical order)

Shahin Afrassiabi; ‘Home’

JOHN: A static shot, half composed of white, with red material intruding beneath. A seemingly random collection of sounds from talk radio or television are heard, slowly snatches emerge. Mopeds, a body found on a golf course. Murder on the roads, in the suburbs. “They shouldn’t be here,” claims a politician or letterwriter and as if to answer the listener appears to move away.

SIMON: An effective study in boredom, the psychological blank slate against which all manner of deviant behaviour is exposed and spontaneously generated, like flyblown maggots on rotting meat…

Mike Bonsall; ‘Day of Creation’

JOHN: Machine noise, loud and abrasive. A tool kit, saws, cutting tools. The slow reveal of a pile of Ballard titles leads you to wonder if here JG’s works are being recut, sliced, diced and served again. The Day of Creation is the final title to appear. The maker has taken Ballard and chopped him up.

SIMON: Mike B. is the creator of the JG Ballard Short Story Concordance, and he is currently working on a concordance of Ballard’s novels. These projects required him to buy extra copies of Ballard books and to razor their pages for easily digestible scanning under the all-powerful OCR software, before they could emerge out the other side as digital mulch. This film, then, is a delightful little in joke aimed squarely by Mike at his own obsessiveness, but it also functions as a sly and clever appraisal of Ballard’s entire ouevre, which has always relied on repetition, recycling, détournement, collage, bricolage…

Julian Gough; ‘Flesh Frame’

JOHN: Micro-entertainment, as flesh is exposed on a computer screen. That it only takes up a quarter of the screen makes it look like the body has been filmed and is being edited. Only to blur into a sunset. Consumerism takes over as the computer screen turns and pulls away to a credit card rectangle ready to accept your chip and PIN.

SIMON: This film chases its own tail, eventually disappearing into the black hole of inner space. Utterly beguiling.

Russell Miller; ‘A Journey Through A Distant Land’

JOHN: Concrete, bleakness, a travelator that moves vs. a river refusing to run. CCTV-positioned footage of a seemingly empty street lined by lock-ups hiding ephemera, memory junk, yesterday’s crashes. Daylight as harsh as the artificial strip lighting. In a denial of creation we return to the water from which we emerged.

SIMON: Classic Ballardian imagery, here: the flyovers, the apartment blocks, the obsessive stalking of nothing in particular. An artificial eye scanning the ruins of a humourless Earth, perhaps…

Jack Strain; ‘Ballardian’

JOHN: An urban warrior applies his warpaint in slow-mo before a projection of traffic is destroyed in a deliberate act of vandalism. The whole process seems to be watched or logged.

SIMON: A fabulously evocative film, menacing and dark, and making full use of the competition’s ‘in camera’ editing stipulation. The burning frame is a wonderful touch, and the glimpse of madness at the very end is bizarre and unsettling, behaviour that is perhaps the only response to the crushing insanity of the outside world.

Supervert; ‘Superego’

JOHN: Big Ballard is watching you! And joined by a smaller version of himself. Ballard argues with himself over an unheard question. As we watch, we are given permission only to be refused a second later. We are eventually told ‘no’ twice and our audience is over. That the responses are from Sam Scoggins’s movie about The Unlimited Dream Company and the ’90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient test’ give the film a different meaning, that you’re being fed the results of a psychological experiment, while appearing to participate in one yourself.

SIMON: This film manipulates footage from the Scoggins film and is just a little disconcerting. It’s like being given a glimpse into a malfunctioning brain, with its psychopathology unashamedly on show, brandished like a weapon. Ultimately the synaptic process is unfathomable and the viewer, like all readers of Ballard, is left on the outer, able to only impotently guess at the intent, forced to fill in the dots herself…

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ J.G. Ballard Pastiche Competition

Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days; the home is going to be a TV studio. We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Andrea Juno and Vale’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

The mobile phone can be seen as a fashion accessory and adult toy as well as a break-through in instant communication, though its use in restaurants, shops and public spaces can be irritating to others. This suggests that its real function is to separate its users from the surrounding world and isolate them within the protective cocoon of an intimate electronic space. At the same time phone users can discreetly theatricalize themselves, using a body language that is an anthology of presentation techniques and offers to others a tantalizing glimpse of their private and intimate lives.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Impressions of Speed’, in Speed : visions of an accelerated age / / edited by Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz (1998).

Original photography by Steve Double (Ballard) and Jerry Bauer (Self).

The indefatigable Mike Bonsall has kindly transcribed the Will Self segment on BBC Radio 4′s Open Book program; listen to the entire program on the Open Book website. Mike says: “Interesting to note the ‘quote’ from Millennium People at the start (and probably the second one), isn’t taken directly from the text but I’m guessing is a slice from an adaptation which ran some time ago as a short serial on Radio 4.”

The interviewer is Mariella Frostrup, the regular presenter of Open Book.

Reader: Outside Broadcasting House the demonstrators pressed closer to the entrance. A smoke bomb shot a gust of black vapour into the air. A startled security guard tripped over one of the barriers and fell to the ground. The protesters seized their chance and surged past him, forcing their way through the doors, led by one of the BBC producers who had come over to our side. They planned to invade the new studio and broadcast the manifesto of middle-class rebellion to the listening nation, mouths agape over their muesli.

Not the staff response to Mark Thompson’s recent BBC cuts, but JG Ballard’s vividly imagined revolt of the middle-classes in Millennium People. Will Self will be telling me about that book, and his passion for the work of JG Ballard…

Mariella Frostrup: …there’s a new book … from the novelist JG Ballard, but this is non-fiction. An autobiography dealing with his childhood in Shanghai, the trauma of World War Two, his family’s internment by the Japanese, his eventual move to Britain and a productive life spent writing in Shepperton. Much of this Shanghai story was included in the Booker nominated novel Empire of the Sun. But alongside more autobiographical work, he’s also renowned for his Science Fiction novels and more recently a string of very engaging books about the malevolent influence of a technologically obsessed society, the moral vacuum at the heart of modern life, and a middle-class who are, quite literally revolting. Well, to offer a reader’s guide to Ballard, and to help me pick my way through his work, I’m joined by one of his best-known fans, the novelist Will Self. Will — welcome. Ballard has produced a lot of work though; seventeen novels, and many many more short stories, so where would you invite somebody to start?

Will Self: I’ll declare my colours, I think he’s probably the most significant and influential — or among a handful of the most significant and influential — writers of the English language since the second war. So, why not read them in order? You could do that and get the full development. Perhaps an easier way in, and there’s nothing wrong with sometimes taking things easy, is a kind of autobiographical way into it. I mean many people — when Empire of the Sun came out and then a second sort of quasi-autobiographical novel, The Kindness of Women, which came out in 1991 — felt that these works recapitulated and explained a lot of the themes, the motifs, the kind of currents that ran through his more, in a sense attention-grabbing, fictional work, they saw what the genesis was. So you could start with those two novels and then work into the fiction from them.

MF: Because the books that preceded Empire of the Sun had mainly been what we might call, for shorthand, science fiction, hadn’t they? And they had been sort of post-cataclysmic novels about dystopian futures.

WS: Mmm, they are kind of apocalyptic. I mean he kicks off, Ballard, with this book The Drowned World which is astonishingly prescient like a lot of his science fiction. I mean Ballard, to get this straight, has always viewed his sort of science fiction as being concerned with inner, rather than outer space. He’s not death-rays or weird aliens or anything like that at all, he’s very much writing about parallel worlds that mutate out of our own or are latent within our own. And in the Drowned World, which really showcases this preoccupation, you have a strange journey, through a very recognisably drowned Britain really — so very astonishing prescient about global warming.

MF: And I think published in about 1962?

WS: ’62 is The Drowned World, and then you have The Burning World (or The Drought), The Crystal World, and then you get to another kind of thematic break in Ballard’s work, when he publishes The Atrocity Exhibition, which doesn’t have a conventional narrative, it contains some of his most extreme imagery of, kind of, physical discorporation. It maps out the territory of what Ballard has described as the Death of Affect, this kind of — I think like a writer who he was friendly with in the 60s and who he knew fairly well, William Burroughs — Ballard’s view was that in the post-Hiroshima era there had been this kind of death of feeling in western culture, and a lot of his shock-tactics and his extreme imagery, are aimed at mapping this landscape. Contained in the Atrocity Exhibition, is the kernel, the germ, of perhaps one of his most famous novels, Crash — there is a section of the Atrocity Exhibition entitled Crash — and then he goes on to publish Crash in 1973.

MF: Described by one critic as ‘the most repulsive book I’ve ever read’!

WS: It’s a book that carries with it this most astonishing penumbra. I know that one early editor that read it sort of suggested that Ballard sought psychiatric help. As many people will know, it’s a book about the relationship between sexual excitation and car accidents. It begins with this incredible description of how this man who pursues sexual kicks through car crashes, achieves his aim:

Reader: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan’s body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.

WS: Now, around this time another major theme I think begins to develop in Ballard’s work, which is this idea of a kind of dystopian critique of contemporary society and it begins with a novel called High-Rise. In High-Rise a war develops between the kind of lower-class tenants of the building and the upper-class tenants on the top. And this kind of social, almost political critique, Ballard develops through a series of books and it kind of goes on into the later kind of — tetrarchy, trilogy, I don’t know what – quartet, of novels which begins with Cocaine Nights in 1996 and is still running; it’s gone through Millennium People, Super-Cannes, and now on to Kingdom Come. That kind of social critique is another thing.

MF: One of my favourites, I have to say, is Millennium People and the notion of this kind of disenfranchised middle-class who decide finally that enough is enough. We’ve got a reading from that as well, maybe we’ll play it then I’d love to hear your thoughts on that book.

Reader: The residents of Chelsea Marina had launched a small crime wave on the surrounding neighbourhood, as executives and middle-managers gave up their jobs; there was an outbreak of petty thieving from delis and off-licences. Every parking meter in Chelsea Marina was vandalised and the council street-cleaners, traditional working-class to the core, refused to enter the estate, put off by the menacing middle-class air. Removed from their expensive schools, bored teenagers haunted Slone Square and the King’s Road, trying their hands at drug-dealing and car theft.

MF: It’s enough to have you setting your four-by-four alight isn’t it Will?

WS: Yes, it’s difficult to tell with Ballard exactly how far his tongue is in his cheek, or whether it’s wrapped right the way round the back of his head. I think the interesting thing about Millennium People perhaps, as opposed to the two precursor books, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes — which are kind of a piece — is that it’s very funny. It’s very, very sly and very, very funny. And he himself has been absolutely unashamed in professing his contempt and hatred for the metropolitan bourgeoisie, he’s always had this thing that he lives out at Shepperton.

MF: I can’t let you go — seeing as his new book, coming out in February, is an autobiography — without talking a bit more about the autobiographical work. Was that very straightforward in comparison? I mean Empire of the Sun — a pretty classic novel in most aspects?

WS: I think the thing about Empire of the Sun is that it is relatively straightforward; it seems to be a naturalistic novel. But in a way I’d sort of urge people coming fresh to Ballard perhaps not to leap in with Empire of the Sun. Read a couple of the other ones first, because it’s fascinating to come to Empire of the Sun and see that this is the crucible of his perspective of the world. His father worked in Shanghai; they lived in the kind of English canton there in a kind of wealthy upper-middle-class atmosphere in the late 1930s, and then the cataclysm of the collapse of Chinese society, of the invasion of the Japanese from the north. And he, you know he would see people dead on the streets on his way to school, the dead and dying, and then of course the internment by the Japanese. And so all of these images of, kind of, dystopian, run down, fractured societies and indeed his imagery of hyper-shiny technological futures comes out of the war. So all of that imagery is there once you’ve read some of the other books to kind of see what its genesis is in Empire of the Sun.

The companion book to Empire of the Sun is Kindness of Women. And many people feel that Ballard is perhaps a bit too heavy for their taste, a little too disturbing, a little too warped. Kindness of Women is all of those things and it’s also an extremely affecting book about love and about the impact of love on somebody’s life. This is a novel that actually kind of made me cry and that’s not something that I can say about many things apart from people treading hard on my feet.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

An Interview with Paul Plamper and Niklas Goldbach
by Dan O’Hara

In July on the roof terrace of the Ludwigsmuseum, the major museum of modern art in Cologne, I attended a ‘screening’ of a radio play. I say ‘screening’ because a film had been made to accompany the play, the combined effect of audio and film a little like Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Called Hochhaus, the play was a three-part adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. A faithful rendition in terms of plot and themes, it transposed the action of the novel to Berlin in the near future. The programme described the play as follows:

Berlin, 2013. A star architect has built in the capital the tallest residential building in Europe. There he wants to create a social Utopia: the Neokommune K 13. Nothing is wanting in this autarchy, a completely self-sufficient closed system. But the high-rise becomes a pressure cooker of neighbourhood enmity and rampant, uninhibited class warfare. In the blink of a camera’s eye, this modern super-community regresses into a biotope of primitive lifeforms. Based on J. G. Ballard’s science fiction novel, Paul Plamper has produced a horror radio play of pressing sociological relevance, which could take place in every German home. “Never forget: You are Hochhaus!”

With the Kölner Dom looming behind the roof terrace, and a panorama of the city stretching away towards the west, some fifty or sixty people settled down to listen for three hours to the German version of High-Rise. At nine in the evening, the sky was at first still too bright for the audience to see much of the film, so many of them sat with their heads down or eyes closed, concentrating on listening. In any case the film appeared to be merely a static image of a huge skyscraper, a carbuncle of a compressed city, a futurist mockery of the Gothic Cathedral at our backs.

There were some very interesting angles taken in terms of adaptation – the film was made in parts of the old GDR, and there were persistent echoes of and references to Nazism, Speer’s social engineering through architecture being one of the more telling ones. I spoke to the author, Paul Plamper, and his colleague Niklas Goldbach, a video artist who made the accompanying film. Radio plays or ‘Hörspiele’ are hugely popular in Germany – the original broadcast, on WDR in November 2006, reached around 100,000 listeners – and Ballard is relatively unknown, so this radio adaptation would introduce Ballard’s name to an audience that had hitherto encountered him only through Cronenberg and Spielberg’s films. I wanted to find out why Plamper and Goldbach had chosen to adapt High-Rise. What relevance did Ballard’s 1975 novel have, in their view, for the Germany of the near future?

Dan O’Hara teaches English & American Literature at the University of Cologne. He is currently working on a monograph on J. G. Ballard.

NOTE: Performances of Hochhaus are due to restart on 12 January 2008 at the Theater Mannheim. See the endnote for more information.

DAN: Can I ask you first of all why you chose to adapt High-Rise? Because, as far as I’m aware, Ballard’s not very well known in Germany.

PAUL: No, he’s not that well known, actually. At least not when I was searching for a German translation of High-Rise a few years ago. There were some rare copies of an old edition being traded on the internet. I got hold of one of those and was immediately attracted. In Germany, the cultural establishment builds up a strong frontier between what they call ‘culture’ and what they call ‘entertainment’, and I think some, uhm, stupid intellectuals put Ballard more in the ‘entertainment’ Schublade, the entertainment category. But on the other hand you also have thinkers like Heiner Müller being admirers, so…

DAN: Really? I didn’t know about that. Heiner Müller, the ‘Hamletmaschine’ author?

PAUL: Yes, the dramatist. He liked science fiction and he liked crime literature. So, as you see, you find Ballard in different cultural circles. The science fiction and fantasy communities read him, and from time to time an open minded intellectual. That’s what I like about Ballard, he’s not easy to put in just one bracket.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: So what was it particularly about this one novel? What did you have in mind when you adapted it?

PAUL: Well, concerning the themes, I was looking for material for a ‘horror’ radio play. I wanted to do a monster radio play without monsters, but with humans. I discovered that Ballard is rather a specialist in this subject, and that his well-cultivated and very sensitive paranoia really makes him somewhat of a prophet; you know, he wrote the novel in 1975, and now the novel is being slowly caught up by reality. He was paranoiac enough to know what was going to happen.

I’m also looking for interesting acoustical situations for my radio plays. In High-Rise there’s a small society in a very condensed space. If you just look at social interaction: when it’s silent, you hear your neighbours in your room. The wall is something that separates you from them but the level of audio is really what separates you the least. You don’t see them but you hear them. So the sort of social pressure which has to be related is really well-suited to a radio play. I’m always searching for interesting topics, but most of all for subject matters that must be a radio play and no other medium, film, or whatever.

DAN: You move the action to future Berlin; I’m very intrigued by this shift.

PAUL: Well, since Ballard wrote High-Rise, things that happen in the novel now really happen in the middle of society, in public, in the media. So we thought, we won’t put the building in a suburb, as Ballard does – in the novel it’s in the outskirts of London, hidden away, where these terrible things can happen because nobody takes notice of it. We put our house right in the middle of Berlin, and it’s a prestigious project run by an architect who is a very adept publicist. He’s played by Martin Wuttke and we named him Philip del Ponte, a character like Daniel Libeskind or similar, you know, people who make grand architectural gestures and yet who are at the same time extremely clever in developing cute ideas to sell their architecture and to be in the public eye. We moved the whole story to the border of the Spree – this is actually 100 metres from here, where I live. Where before, there was the Wall, now there’s a gap at the river, and there are vast areas where a new centre is being developed for the media, MTV moved there for example. And there are gated communities. They’re like a virus spreading in Berlin. They have all these phony names like “Prenzlauer Gärten”. Well-to-do creative people start these projects like community projects; everybody has his financial interest, buys part of the building and thinks he invests in a social project.

NIKLAS: But there’s a new meaning to ‘social’ for these people. It doesn’t have anything to do with the social vision of Ballard or anyone in the ’70s for example…

DAN: It’s not to do with community?

NIKLAS: No. Well, maybe it is, but not with the idea of a social system where the stronger help the poor, for example. I don’t think you could find anything like the social system Ballard presents in High-Rise nowadays in Berlin.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: When I think of gated communities in England, the ones that Ballard’s talked about for example in Running Wild, his 1988 novel, in which some children living in a gated community kill their parents, such gated communities are very upper-middle class, and people choose to live in them apparently because of fear. These are high-security environments with surveillance cameras, private security guards… I wonder if it’s the same sort of thing in Berlin?

PAUL: We’re talking about something new. This certainly exists, but what interests us right now even more is that you have such gated communities combined with the fact that you can buy being a ‘good person’. You can purchase a good feeling by moving into a living community of house owners. In the 60s and 70s there was the start of the Kommune in Germany, Kommune Eins and so on. Now it’s part of the market, and there’s no contradiction at all. Communal feeling has been absorbed by the market. It goes together with the fact that, yes, of course these people live gated, because they say “ok, I’m moving near Kreuzberg, how exciting, a real ghetto, so I have to protect our stuff a little bit. Generally I’m open minded, come on, I was punk in the 80s, but still, I don’t want to get robbed.” They’re not really frightened, they think they’re just rationally pragmatic.

NIKLAS: And also I think what’s kind of key for Berlin, I mean, you live Dan in Cologne, right?

DAN: I do now, yes.

NIKLAS: Cologne has a completely different structure as a city from Berlin, obviously, because of the separation and the Wall. Berlin was for such a long time a kind of playground for people to try out new social structures, but lately there’s this gentrification process in Berlin that’s really overwhelming. In Kreuzberg, which was or which still is an alternative quarter of the city, now there are rich people moving in and all these condominiums being built. I saw one house where you can park your car in front, on the same level as your apartment, to make it safer for you. So there are all these weird architectural ideas popping up, and then there are other areas like Prenzlauer Berg which is in former East Berlin, where you have a real gentrification melting point, where only families live and everybody behaves as if they live in a small village. So especially from that point of view, it makes total sense to put High-Rise in Berlin. Where else in Europe right now? Probably in East Europe soon, but right now this is the place where most of the gentrification is happening, or where it’s visible. A lot of money moved to Berlin because it’s the capital, and there are so many real gated communities: there’s one right in the middle of the city for example, next to a park, the ‘Volkspark Friedrichshain’; and they have a doorman. You can only get in if you pass the doorman, and then you have a street, and a pool, and little houses, like a suburb. And this is happening in 2007 – in the center of Berlin; Paul makes Hochhaus happen in 2013, not that far away. And I don’t think it’s that much of a utopia.

PAUL: We have a doorman called Weingarten in the radio play, played by an old actor from the East who I met at the Berliner Ensemble, Heinrich Buttchereit. He has a Stasi pass in the play; he’s been hired by del Ponte because he has the best techniques in surveillance and security… They’re just very well trained. At one point, when there’s an escalation of the situation in the house, Weingarten says: “it’s just as before: we don’t have the Wall in a vertical sense anymore, now it’s horizontal, in the house, between the upper class and the lower class.” He says “ok, now I have my Wall back!”

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: There’s a great deal of political content in your adaptation; and with these references to Weingarten being ex-Stasi and, also, Niklas, I think you said you’d filmed some parts in the ex-GDR, was that right?

NIKLAS: Yeah, that’s true.

DAN: There are echoes – deliberate echoes? – of the GDR, of the Stasi and of Nazi Germany. What’s the point of these echoes for your audience? What are you trying to say to them?

NIKLAS: Well, Berlin has changed so much, at least for me. My background is that I’m a visual artist, a video artist, and most of my work is about the role of the individual in a world on the edge of dystopia. Maybe this is a very pessimistic view – let’s say it’s an artistic view, it’s maybe not only my personal view. I’d worked with Paul before, on another radio play called Release that actually took place in a prison. He told me about his new play, and invited me to a pre-listening session, and I thought about images that could occur within the three acts of the audio play. First of all I went straight to the point where Paul’s fictional high-rise would stand, between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, right on the border where the Wall was. I went and took photos. It’s a vast area, and I thought, well, what kind of architecture could be in this area?

All the three parts of the radio play are filmed in the former GDR, there’s not a single West German building. I think there are several reasons for that, but one reason is for example that the GDR system seems like a mixture of dystopia and utopia to me – it started as a utopia – of a social project. Del Ponte, the architect in the radio play, his idea is to make a social project that combines different classes of people. And this is actually what the GDR system had in common with del Ponte – maybe. His idea is to get rid of classes in this building; and that was also an idea of the GDR – West Germany never had that idea.

PAUL: You know, Ballard puts a big focus on the social classes in his novel, and at first you think, oh, the social classes, nowadays those concepts sound really seventies, but actually my thoughts are the exact opposite. West Germany since WWII has tried to have this soziale Marktwirtschaft – a social market economy – and until the beginning or the middle of the ’90s, it worked quite well. Do you have this expression, the ‘social scissor’? It’s a like a scissor that’s wide or narrow: you have the classes drifting apart from each other or closer to each other. Up to the `90s, the scissor was half closed, but in the last ten years, this has been completely, outrageously reversed. Now you have the underprivileged again; you have a small upper class getting richer and more powerful. I thought that we had to start talking about classes again. Ballard wrote about them in 1975, and now it’s back, it’s a very hot topic again.

Part two of the radio play is really about this. And at the same time it’s like a fast-forward history of the extreme Left in Germany. From the initial spontaneous protests in the sixties, the fun Sponti actions, up to the Red Army Faction in the late seventies, which got to be rather violent and militarily organized. The camera-man Andreas Lang – in the novel he’s called Wilder – lives on the ground floor. Lang, played by Milan Peschel, is accused of having killed the first human in the house, the second victim after the dog. Lang’s first reaction to the accusation is to gather people around him, to play Skat, a card game. As an act of political protest, they play cards in front of the supermarket on the 23rd floor, and then their protest gets more violent. Lang moves from being a buddy of the underprivileged, to being their leader. He leads a Feldzug…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: Like a battle, a campaign.

PAUL: They go up the high-rise, trying to burn the food stores of the upper class. Barricades have already been built from sofas and so on, so that there’s no access to the upper floors anymore. Lang and his followers succeed in burning the food stores, and in a very irrational moment they announce hunger for the whole house.

NIKLAS: Their slogan is “Solidarity with the hungry people in this world”.

DAN: When I’m looking at your original blurb for the Ludwigsmuseum, it’s called a ‘Horror Hörspiel’. And yet…

PAUL: A sociological horror Hörspiel…

DAN: … yes. And yet there’s a huge amount of political content here.

PAUL: Ballard is a political author for me. Many pages in the novel are about the class system. I like his political content; but at the same time I fear that we sound like a couple of humorless Germans now, who do heavy, grey, intellectual type stuff, but don’t get us wrong, the radio play is meant to be pure entertainment; it has the rhythm of an action movie…

NIKLAS: This is what we said in the beginning about Ballard himself, that this is an entertaining book which also has the quality of political comment. It’s supposed to be entertaining, but there’s obviously a deeper meaning to it. For example, look at the function of del Ponte, the architect, as opposed to Andreas Lang, the leader of the revolution. Especially in 2007, I think a lot of different types like del Ponte are out there, you know, private people or private investors who take over functions of the state. He’s a private person sponsoring the lower class like, for example, some celebrities or rich people today give some of their earnings back to the lower class. So it’s a bit ambivalent, what he’s doing. To the outside world he looks like he’s a really good guy but in the end, he’s the one who’s living in the penthouse.

DAN: I wondered if you also had a sense of the fact that, in the book, there’s a very specific relationship between Wilder and Anthony Royal – between Andreas Lang and del Ponte in Hochhaus – there’s this Oedipal backstory in the novel. In a sense it’s as if Ballard’s using that psychological backstory to make a political point.

PAUL: Well, we have the same two characters – the big antipodes – and we pretty much go along with Ballard’s narrative. In the end, Andreas Lang, our Wilder, when he’s already quite animal-like, mounts to the upper floors and kills del Ponte. It’s almost the same story. And then he gets eaten by the women, by the Matriarchat.

When I read the novel, I felt that Ballard really likes to develop the characters and their steps in a psychologically logical order. He has plenty of time to explain what could be the psychological background of Wilder doing what he does, and of his regression into animal status and so on. But in a radio play you don’t have that much time; and also I had the sense that in 2006 you don’t have to explain why people freak out, it’s so obvious, that utopia is, I don’t know… I have the impression that Ballard still felt some sort of friction with a positive utopian vision of a society, and so he described its regression into a barbarian state. Sometimes I thought that Ballard in the novel places his figures in a kind of sociological chess game. This figure moves from here to there because of this and that. I didn’t feel it necessary to explain so much in our radio play. The dynamic is a musical dynamic.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN:I can see that perhaps you don’t need so much narration. But you did introduce a narrator, didn’t you? There’s an extra-diegetic voice.

PAUL: Yeah; the great Volker Spengler is the narrator. You might know him from his films with Fassbinder. Like in Greek tragedy where you have the person who sees things and advances them, his narrator seems to know everything. He’s the transcendent voice. Volker just does it merely by his great personality and his destroyed voice, which breathes a lot of what he has lived.

DAN: Yeah, he has a wonderful voice. What specific narrative changes did you make in the adaptation? You introduce an external narrator; you shift to a straight chronological narrative…

PAUL: A listener can’t grasp 30 people like in the novel, he has to concentrate a lot to get to know even 10. So my co-author, Kai Hafemeister and I tried to take as few characters as possible, so that we still could see this as a small society that evolves. We have eight or so main characters, and not many very small parts, because I personally have a big aversion to this ‘protagonist and many small parts’ thing. We try to create an emotional involvement with each character. We wanted to have characters that you want to get to know better with each episode, because they were broadcast on three consecutive Fridays. So we had to make you want to continue to spend your time with these horrible people.

DAN: And what function does the voice-over narration serve?

PAUL: He’s telling as much as is needed, as seldom as possible. When we call it a sociological horror radio play, he’s the horror part – supported of course by the soundtrack, which is by SchneiderTM. Spengler’s voice… It’s so difficult to describe it. Like a field in which an atomic bomb exploded… He has a post-World War Three voice…

DAN: It reminded me of Vincent Price or Christopher Lee…

NIKLAS: He’s the same kind of character…

PAUL: At the end-credits, Volker always says, ‘And remember: You – are High-rise…’ This is an allusion to a recent campaign of the CDU government in Germany. They wanted to try to impose more national feeling on us. You had all these stupid billboards – saying ‘You Are Germany’ everywhere. So Volker concludes each part – they get more and more horrifying – with ‘You Are High-rise’.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Are you concerned about nationalism at the moment? In Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come, he’s turned his attention towards specifically English nationalism.

PAUL: Yeah, I understand that. We recorded our radio play right before the soccer World Cup in 2006. There were young Germans with flags and the national colours on their faces, a new kind of ‘pop nationalism’. After what happened in the Nazi era, Germans thought they could finally show an non-violent national feeeling, just as in other countries. They had the feeling that everybody steps together, that we are a stronger society. This also infected our way of telling High-Rise, that people are trying to create this new community. And then you see what happens to it. Which would lead you, as a society as a whole, to the next war. In High-Rise, it leads you to the terrible end. I don’t know; I look at history as something cyclical, and not so much as a regression into a barbarian state. We tell the story of only one high-rise, and in the end we put a bigger accent on the fact that the women take over, as after WWII it was the Trümmerfrauen, the ‘rubble women’, in Germany who rebuilt society, and really started the German Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle. After WWII, it was the women who cleaned up the men’s mess. Like the Matriarchat in the novel. We emphasized this; you see there’s a new order evolving; it starts again, a cycle.

We have a saying, vor der eigenen Tür kehren – to take the brush and clean in front of your own door – and that’s what Kai and me are trying to do. We’re trying to tell the story as close as possible to us, as if it could happen next to us, as if it could happen within us. Of course that’s something that is much bigger than the rise of nationalism right now. It’s like High-Rise being an image for a deliberate prison, and this prison which is self-chosen just displaces your view of another prison, which is Homo sapiens not getting out of his monstrous skin. Homo sapiens has this trait of this monstrosity; let’s face the fact. It’s a very Ballardian thought. Goya once said ‘I don’t fear witches, or poltergeists, or ghosts, or braggers or giants, or evil men; I fear no creature but one – the human.’ He said that in 1790, and I think Ballard could have said the same thing. It’s really about human nature, High-Rise. All these allusions in Hochhaus to the downfall of the socialist system, or how they killed their own ideals in socialist realism – all of these elements are products of, and evolve from, human nature.

DAN: I don’t know if you came across Concrete Island, the novel before High-Rise? For a later edition, Ballard wrote a new introduction in which he refers to both Crash and High-Rise. He says something very close to what you’re saying, and what Goya said; he writes: “[A]s well as the many physical difficulties facing us there are the psychological ones. How resolute are we, and how far can we trust ourselves and our own motives? Perhaps, secretly, we hope to be marooned, to escape our families, lovers and responsibilities. Modern technology, as I tried to show in Crash and High-Rise, offers an endless field-day to any deviant strains in our personalities.” Which is precisely the point you’re also making, no?

PAUL: Yeah. And he also talks in High-Rise about the suppression of anti-social behaviour; the anti-social as something we have to suppress. But regarding Philip del Ponte, our architect, why he’s called that. It’s because there is an original for High-Rise. It’s called the Ponte Tower in Johannesburg. This is why in the beginning I was talking of Ballard as a prophet, because in Johannesburg you had in reality what Ballard’s story depicts. The Ponte Tower is 173m high, 54 floors high, with 2500 people living there and 470 apartments, and it was founded in the seventies too, as the most prestigious tower in town. Up to 2004 it was the biggest building south of the equator. In Johannesburg, you can see it from everywhere. It’s round, and in the middle you have this cylindrical space; it’s like a gigantic trash bin. After a while the Ponte Tower was full of drugs, gang wars and people throwing themselves from the floors – many, many people killed themselves by jumping into the building, into the middle – and everybody threw his trash in the middle so that there was three floors of trash. The whole building stunk terribly. Things were out of control at the Ponte, completely out of control. People trying to hire other people who owned guns to go out and do their shopping for them, because it was too dangerous; the elevators not functioning; child prostitution – it was incredible. You think, ah, Ballard must have known about this, but then the Ponte was founded in 1976 – Ballard wrote High-Rise only one year before. So our architect is called Philip del Ponte because of this tower; though he has an aristocratic ‘del’ in front of the ‘Ponte’…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: To correspond with the ‘Royal’ of Anthony Royal, I suppose, yes?

PAUL: Yes.

DAN: It’s an unusual format; a radio play with a film accompanying it. Is this part of a bigger project, or a general direction you’re taking with your own work?

PAUL: We did the radio play first, and then I thought of how to present it in public because I thought it could be interesting to show it at the Hörspielzentrale, in a series of radio play events at the Hau, a theatre in Kreuzberg. Then of course I thought of Niklas, because he’s a specialist in architecture. We should describe the videos, no, Niklas?

DAN: I did want to ask you about the film for the first episode. There’s a sentence in High-Rise: “They would film the exteriors from a helicopter, and from the nearest block four hundred yards away – in his mind’s eye he could already see a long, sixty-second zoom, slowly moving from the whole building in frame to a close-up of a single apartment, one cell in this nightmare termitary.” Which is more or less exactly your first film, no?

NIKLAS: Yeah it is. But to be honest this is a coincidence… When Paul asked me to join Hochhaus, my first intention was to read the book, and then we decided, maybe it’s better if I don’t read the book… So instead I tried to concentrate on the characters in Paul’s version of High-Rise. And, as Paul said, most of my work is about the human environment and urbanism, and it has some formal characteristics. In my video work, for example, one of the characteristics is the manipulation of time and the control of the image, and the use of of post-production. It’s mostly about personal feelings of alienation or mass cultural fantasies; the key themes of the latest works are the contradictions between public and private spheres. I try to examine how this comes down to a personal level, and try to use video – this is a cheesy metaphor, but maybe it’s allowed – to use video as a temporal microscope, trying to capture the moment where the subconscious shifts objectivity. This is why I was completely blown away when I listened to the first version of Hochhaus, because what Paul had done on the audio level was actually what I’m trying to do on the video level in my work, because Hochhaus is highlighting the political tensions between these visions of utopia and the subjective experiences of individuals. Also, I think that humans mostly use architecture to express their power, in every form of society, and some of my videos are about the failure of architecture, about the failure of a utopia and its turning into a dystopia.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Could you describe the three films, which accompany the three episodes?

NIKLAS: Ok. The first one, where you just said that there’s this zoom that’s described in the book. First of all it was a weird process to visualize this building because it should be mostly in the head of the audience, you know, you should imagine this building and it could have all different associations, but then I found the buildings at Ernst-Thälmann-Park, which is a socialist building park in former East Berlin. Ernst Thälmann was the leader of the Communist party during, I think, much of the Weimar Republic and his buildings are actually like a small version of what’s described in High-Rise. They were like small high-rises, but with a park around them and the buildings were on a hill so that everyone who was living in that building had a very good view, which is a kind of social idea. Obviously there are also bigger apartments on the very top and you had to be member of the socialist party to live in them, so there’s again this hypocrisy; I guess it’s a very hypocritical way to invent a social structure, when there’s power involved, anyway. I went first of all to the area where Paul’s version of High-Rise was supposed to take place, and Paul had already said that it’s close to this area where MTV and other big companies have started to have their flagship stores or their company buildings. I took pictures of one vast area where there was previously a club, and where now they’re building a big, multi-functional stadium. This is right where our imagined high-rise is, in the image in the first video. So what I did is I went to Ernst-Thälmann-Park and just stacked the buildings there on top of each other. This is obviously a metaphor: stacking these socialist buildings on top of each other to get a bigger idea of the whole thing.

PAUL: He did it almost like a plastic surgeon – from one house he makes a Tower of Babylon; it’s beautiful.

NIKLAS: It changes a lot of the content, I think. Regarding the technical aspects: at the beginning, the zoom, it’s a digital zoom, because the whole building itself is a Photoshop building. It’s combined with video in the background: the sky that’s shading from daylight into night is real; and also you see the skyline of Berlin, you see the TV tower in the background of the video, just to make the whole thing look a bit more real but also a bit like a comic. It looks like a fantasy building but it has this weird mixture of reality because it’s made from real images. The concept of the first part is that it begins in daylight, whilst in the radio play we’re listening to a TV show where the architect is talking about the building. He’s describing what you can see in the video; you look at my building, and listen to what Del Ponte says about his building. There are some parts where it’s really fitting and some others where it’s not fitting, which is good because then you have the idea that this is not the building: it’s just a placeholder for the building, in a way. When the first part of the audio play ends, it ends in the dark, at a party, and the first human dies. But this is happening at night, and so as the video image slowly zooms into the building, you end up at the entrance hall of the building, so metaphorically by the end of the first part you’re in the nightmare. It starts as a TV show, and in the end you’re in complete darkness, surrounded by the light of the windows – and you’re part of that building.

PAUL: Yeah, and the camera is right in front of the building, you know, in the entrance where the first dead person is thrown from the top floor…

NIKLAS: …out of the window…

PAUL: … that’s where the image ends…

NIKLAS: …yeah. And the people in the audio play are also looking out of the window, so they look down to the ground. This is where you find yourself at the end of the video.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

The second part was filmed in a building on the German island Rügen, a Nazi seaside resort. I think it’s the longest building in Europe: it’s 4.5 kilometers long, and it was the KDF building, which was built by the Nazis. It was part of the Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ programme. It was supposed to be a hotel for so-called ‘good Germans’. It was never finished; it actually ended up as a ruin, but then after WWII the GDR used it as an army barracks, where the army of the GDR was stationed. And then after the Wall came down it was used as a youth hostel, and it still is – they had stopped using it as a youth hostel, but I read recently in the news that it’s re-opened, which is such a weird idea. When you listen to the audio play, the second film corresponds to what is really happening in the building, whereas the first film is derived just from the structure of the audio play. The first part introduces us to the house and the people, whereas the second part is where everything is turning from a utopia into a dystopia, or from a funny audio play into a horror scenario. In the audio play when a new chapter starts, you hear the sound of the elevator. So, in the second film, the audience is actually stuck in this elevator that you hear all through the audio play. It’s actually spectating what’s happening in the building, and you can see how everything’s falling apart literally in the image, when there’s this very slow fade from the intact floor of the building, which was actually Photoshopped, to how the building in Rügen looks today. So it fades from a fictional image into a real image, whereas the audience is just stuck in the elevator, and through the elevator doors, they’re forced to watch the process of decay.

PAUL: There are several buildings in Prora-Rügen, that are exactly the same size and so on. Some are well-kept, because there’s the youth hostel inside, then there are others which are just ruins, at least on the inside, you have all these cables sticking out. I think Niklas broke into one of those…

NIKLAS: …yeah, I did break in, I brought an axe…

PAUL: …to film the ruin, and so you see in 50 minutes a fade from a nice long, intact, well-kept floor, to the same floor as a ruined chaos of cables. The video does nothing but that.

NIKLAS: But in fact I used three images, because the floors that are intact where the youth hostel was don’t look as nice as the high-rise should look before the revolution or the battle starts. So I photoshopped it; the very first image when the elevator opens in the video is pure photoshop. And then it goes to the real image: how the intact floors look today. And then I fade into the parts of the building that are completely falling into disrepair.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: And then the third film, which reminded me of bits of Chris Marker, or Tarkovsky…

NIKLAS: I was really happy when I read that, because both of these visionaries are like real heroes of mine. So thank you for that…

DAN: Well, it’s a very clear visual echo. Ballard himself is a real fan of Chris Marker.

NIKLAS: Yeah, I can totally believe that. So, the third part is filmed in Rechlin. It’s a very, very small village in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), so also former GDR. The houses you can see in the video were model houses for Germania, built by Albert Speer. They’re four or five-storeys high, and they look like miniatures of high-rises. You find them completely abandoned in the woods, and there are no signs for how to find them. I knew about the buildings from a documentary, so I went with a car, and I really had to search. There are no signs because there are still a lot of mines in that area from the war. What happened is that the Nazis used the buildings as test buildings, and they dropped bombs on them, because the buildings themselves were a mixture of a house where people were supposed to live and a bunker. They’re massive, made out of concrete. So that was their function; and now you find these four buildings in the middle of the wood, completely abandoned.

There’s a wild garden on top of the filmed ruin – and the end of the audio play is also taking place on the roof – this is where the women build a new society, a Matriarchat. But the video actually starts in the ruins of the building, whereas the audio play starts in this Circus Maximus arena, when Andy Lang is fighting against all the others and becomes the leader of the lower class by physical violence. Then the architect, del Ponte, comes downstairs and says, well, if you are a gladiator, I am Caesar. So there are all these references to ancient Rome; and these ruins in the film, if you look really close at them they have a similar kind of patina. But when you zoom out you see that they are part of a vision of another time in history. The building on Rügen and Speer’s buildings were part of a vision that didn’t include the human being. So for me they are an architectural metaphor of a society, or a reference to a model of society in which the human actually can’t survive.

PAUL: Because Niklas uses these extremely slow-motion fades, you look at the image, but you don’t see the change. It’s a very dramatic change, but it’s not obvious when you look at it in real-time. You feel that something changes, but you can’t really grasp it. It’s so perfidious, it’s subtle, and it’s absolutely not Hollywoodesque. It has a different kind of tension. Because the radio play is so dense – yet the videos give you the freedom to have your own image of the characters. At the same time the videos show the big process, what I talked of as the evolutionary cycle.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: When I made the videos, there was this question about how you do a video to a radio play and not turn the whole thing into a movie. When I first listened to the radio play I wrote down a lot of images, but they’re all just details. In the end there was the decision to in fact just show one image in each video that’s slowly changing. 55 minutes is quite a long time for a video – and I think if you just use one image, and look at it for a long time, it kind of disappears and gets replaced by other images. Warhol said that if you look at one image and you think it’s boring, just look at it for ten minutes and if it’s still boring, look at it for like 20 minutes and so on… In our case, you’re looking at one image for 55 minutes, and there’s a change happening, but you also have the audio that’s guiding you through a completely different world. I noticed that some people during the shows were closing their eyes; it was fun for me to watch their reaction when they opened their eyes again because all of a sudden the video was at a completely different point. I think some people thought, oh, it’s just one image, I don’t have to look at that, and then after a while they noticed that a lot has changed.

DAN: Absolutely. I actually rather enjoyed the fact that, during the first part, it got dark on the video as it was getting dark in Köln.

NIKLAS: Yeah, it was. I was really happy that the screen itself was not on the side of the Dom, because that would have been really tough competition…

Dan O’Hara, 2008

Hochhaus is currently touring Germany; the next dates will be on the 12 January 2008, Theater Mannheim, and in February 2008 at the Kampnagel Hamburg. Eventually it will be available to buy at Paul Plamper’s future outlet for radio plays, Hörpark.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Paul Plamper
+ Niklas Goldbach

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II last week, Part III this week.

William Viney, © 2007.

III. Ultimate Waste: Crash and Empire of the Sun

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. Towards the beginning of the novel, Ballard records James’ thoughts on the sexual possibilities of the everyday [1]. James imagines plane-crash victims whose minds have become a ‘brothel of images’ [2]. This phrase neatly draws together the union of sex and destruction that is the novel’s obsession: not only does it suggest the perversions that lurk in the hidden transcript of daily life, but also an attendant destructiveness built into the etymological roots of ‘brothel’. The word originates from the Middle English; broðen, ‘ruined, degenerate’ the past participle of breoðan; ‘to go to ruin ‘ [3]. This intense and paradoxical portrayal of generative destruction is arguably the novel’s central preoccupation, as Ballard himself has noted, the car crash is where the ‘twentieth century reaches its purest expression [...] Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction’ [4]. The crash is inconceivable without laying waste to both man and machine.

With its brutal collision of violence, technology, and desire, Crash represents a distillation of imaginative obsessions, characterised by some as uniquely Ballardian [5]. Nowhere else in Ballard’s oeuvre is the human body treated with such sustained, clinical, and graphic representation. The raw violence of the car crash allows the secret or forbidden aspects of the body to become visible. The corporeality of Crash might seem unrelated to ideas of rubbish and refuse, but, as I hope will become clear, Ballard’s bodies are defined by their waste; made flesh by their vulnerable viscosity.

The definition of the human body through its constituent fluids has a long history. Since Galen (A.D. 130-200?), people have believed our physiological complexion to be the product of four fluid humours: blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile). The letting of one or more of these fluids can directly affect an individual’s health. In this ancient conception, the body is borderless, neither bounded nor defined, a state of continual flux predicated upon the extraction and renewal of fluids. For Dalia Judovitz, Descartes reversed this process, making the body rigid; a machine inhabited by the ghost of consciousness [6]. Ballard’s Crash finds itself at the very juncture of Galen’s and Descartes’ theories of the body. The novel catalogues the body’s oozing fluids with meticulous detail, they are, in fact, often the only physical attributes of what are, in the general, rather hollow characters. On the other hand, Ballard’s bodies incessantly threaten to become machines, blending into the cars with which they collide. The wastes of body and car are frequently commingling, confusing the relations between human and machine, natural and synthetic.

Vomiting proves a regular reaction to a car crash. James vomits across his steering wheel after his crash with Dr. Helen Remington and her husband (C, 14), whilst Catherine and Vaughn both vomit after separate collisions (C, 3, 8). It is well known that one of the body’s instinctive reactions to shock, trauma, or disgust, is to vomit; a seemingly involuntary act that can appear to envelop ones entire being. For Kristeva, the importance of bodily fluids relates to the threatened individual, a safeguard against both a loss of self and a loss of affect. Rather than signifying loss, the excretion of bodily fluids can register a means to ‘compensate for the collapse of the border between inside and outside [...] Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up in order to reassure a subject that is lacking its ‘own and proper self’ [7]. From a more anatomical perspective, vomiting is a sign of the sympathetic nerve at work: the aspect of the nervous system that autonomically regulates the body’s organs. The sympathetic system is closely associated with a primitive ‘fight or flight’ response to bodily trauma [8]. From either the psychoanalytic or the anatomical standpoint, vomiting is a clear signal of bodily threat; to excrete is a powerful statement of corporal vulnerability.

James vomits again when in hospital, the beginnings of a series of illuminating passages that deal with the body’s propensity to excrete various solid and viscous waste materials. This propensity, luridly and voyeuristically imagined by James, becomes an obsession: ‘did small grains of faecal matter still cling to [the nurses'] anuses as they proscribed some antibiotic for a streptococcal throat, did the odour of illicit sex acts infest their underwear [...] traces of smegma and vaginal mucus on their hands [...]?’(C. 19). James becomes transfixed by the lurking filth beneath the sterile exterior of the hospital staff. In the same way, he realises that the nurses are also constantly preoccupied with the ‘unclean’ aspects of his body: ‘all these women only seem to attend to my most infantile zones [...] commissaries guarding my orifices’ (C .22). James’ subjection to the maternalistic waste management of his nurses finds direct parallel in the creation of the body’s boundaries during infancy. Kristeva has argued that the mother has a primal role in mapping the body, using her maternal authority to order the child’s body into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’, ‘waste’ and ‘want’: ‘[t]hrough frustrations and prohibitions, this authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted’ [9]. James has this process rehearsed in the hospital, his orifices, points, lines, surfaces, and hollows are again placed under the ‘commissar’ of female prohibition, giving him a sharpened view of his own body, and a fresh perspective on its waste. Sensitised to the processes of self-creation that the body’s waste inspires, James describes how he ‘saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit.’.. (C, 9). With an ironic allusion to Narcissus, James realises that the body’s waste can hold up a mirror to the self.

Vaughn’s car is always described as dirty. Its first appearance in the novel is anonymously described as: a ‘dusty American car’, as Vaughn watches James and Catherine through his ‘mud-spattered windshield’ (C, 43). Elsewhere, it seems Vaughn’s car cannot appear in the text without the presence of accompanying filth: ‘dusty Lincoln’, ‘unwashed windshield’ (C, 68, 86). The dirt that constantly attaches itself to Vaughn’s Lincoln comes to mark the dangerous and unpredictable character of his obsessions. However, it is the bodily residues that most indelibly mark Vaughn’s car: ‘with mucus from every orifice of the human body’ (C, 111). Vaughn’s brutal obsession with the car crash and the eroticisation of wounds is intimately bound to the residues left on the crashed car: ‘the perverse logic of blood soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue’ (C, 5). Later in the novel, James discovers a ‘black gelatinous material’ that covers ‘the muddied disc of the whitewall tyre’ (C, 129). These ‘gummy residues’, perhaps evidence that Vaughn’s has been actively hitting pedestrians or animals, remark upon the often ambiguous circumstances by which waste material attaches itself to another surface, and by doing so, competes for fresh meaning and significance. To avoid suspicion from the police, Vaughn suggests they clean the car, an act that provokes one of the most ruthlessly powerful scenes of the novel. The episode becomes a ritual in cleansing and defilement, a sardonic automobile-baptism.

James sits passively whilst his wife and Vaughn copulate on the rear seat, giving way to a series of dramatic yet playfully ambiguous juxtapositions: ‘the white soap sluiced across the roof and doors like liquid lace. Behind me, Vaughn’s semen glistened on my wife’s breasts and abdomen. The rollers drummed and battered at the car; the streams of water and soap solution jetted over its now immaculate body’ (C, 134). Elsewhere, Catherine is also described as having ‘immaculate cleanliness’, ‘as if she had reamed out every square centimetre of her elegant body, separately ventilated every pore’ (C, 89–90). She appears so clean to James, so untainted, that he wonders whether ‘her whole identity was a charade’, leading him to deliberately inspect ‘every orifice’, to find some trace of dirt or filth that will verify her existence (C, 90). The central question is this: is Vaughn’s semen analogous to, or at odds with, the soap that jets across the body of the car? Who, or what, is being cleaned? Semen, here and elsewhere in the novel, is entirely divorced from its generative potential. In a similar episode James and Catherine have sex that is ‘empty and sterile, a jerking away of waste tissue’ (C, 97). Ballard prevents any association in Crash between semen and its common life-giving properties. New associative arrangements are therefore fostered. With the car-wash context in mind, we might question William Miller’s argument that semen is ‘the most polluting of male substances’, its contaminating power rising from its sticky fecundity, misogynist threat of instant feminisation, and a complex process of defilement linked to post-coital shame [10]. Miller’s overtly heterosexual reading of the body’s fluids emphasises the possessive or polluting aspects of the body. In contrast, Crash is decidedly neutral in its response to both bodily fluids and the sexual acts that provoke them; no clues are given to guide our response. We are left guessing as to whether the cleaning of the car is an ironic metaphor for the ethical degeneration of the central characters, or that, by having sex with Vaughn, Catherine is actually being cleansed of her corporeal unreality. However morally ambiguous these passages are, the corporeal residues nevertheless provide provocative and arresting images, the reader is allowed an uncompromising vision of the body’s waste.

By repeatedly commingling the fluids of humans and cars, Ballard achieves a certain hybridity of waste, a union of the organic and synthetic that perfectly encapsulates ‘the nightmare marriage between sex and technology’ [11]. As James and Helen have sex in his car for the second time, the equivocal use of pronouns exaggerates the possibility of this marriage:

The nail of her forefinger scratched at this fretline, which rose diagonally from the window-sill at the same angle as the concrete ledge of the irrigation ditch ten feet from the car. In my eyes this parallax fused with the image if an abandoned car lying in the rust-stained grass on the lower slopes of the reservoir embankment. The brief avalanche of dissolving talc that fell across her eyes as I moved my lips across their lids contained all the melancholy of thisderelict vehicle, its leaking engine oil and radiator coolant (C, 61)

The key aspect of this passage is the structural position of ‘this derelict vehicle’, the obscure reference to talc, and the fragmented interaction between ‘her’ and ‘my’ that blurs the object of dereliction. Because engine oil and radiator coolant so easily correlate with fluids of the human body (blood and sweat), the themes of sex, technology, and destruction are precisely rendered in a single ambiguous sentence. The commingling of human and technological wastes, becomes the principal image that draws together the novel’s ambitious thematics: ‘[t]he passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen, and engine coolant’ (C, 63). In the mixing of fluids, death, sex, the body and the machine become inextricably linked.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

When blood, semen, and vomit are mixed, the novelty of the image dulls our familiar reflexes. The blurring of the organic and inorganic undoes our ability to clearly see the abject material, obscuring the relationship between the wastes of the body and the violent event that produces them. Some have tried to argue that the ‘death of affect’ Ballard’s characters experience is due to a media-drenched Baudrillardian hyper-reality [12]. Although this might explain their apparent affectlessness, it does not fully explain our states and levels of abjection; our responses to a book that is often uncomfortable to read. And yet, several things numb the senses when reading Crash, the most obvious being stylistic. Crash lacks Kristeva’s ‘crying-out theme‘, what she goes on to define as ‘the theme of suffering-horror [that] is the ultimate evidence of such states of abjection within a narrative representation’ [13]. The repetitiveness of Ballard’s narrative tone, with its endless brothel of images, never reaches this state of hysteria; Crash has, as Luckhurst has noted, a ‘remorseless monologism’ [14]. It is because Ballard’s prose style is so clinical, so obsessively repetitious, and so immersed in the idiom of the scientific, that it fails to conform to Kristeva’s theory of the abject. Moreover, Ballard’s refusal to employ a lurid vernacular idiom places a clinical filter between image and revulsion. It is through this clipped and distant narrative tone that Ballard can allows the body’s waste to be so wholeheartedly examined, as if dissected in an urban operating theatre. Ballard has described his studies in medicine as ‘minutely paring away the skin and muscles and nerves, carrying out this extremely detailed study of what was once a human being’ [15]. In a similar way, he pares down the descriptive flesh of conventional narrative, leaving a disparate littering of waste material. Crash sees Ballard at his most ambiguously provocative. The obsessive descriptions of organic of inorganic waste serve as both a voyeuristic invitation to share in these gruesome fantasies and a warning against the psychologically deranging combination of technology and late capitalist individualism. The novel was always intended as a ‘cautionary tale’ [16], but a cautionary tale to be voyeuristically enjoyed. The moral ambivalence of the narrative, and the explicit commingling of fluids, prevents our full and unreserved revulsion. Crash allows us to view the body’s waste without the distraction of disgust or the perversity of hedonistic acceptance.

Empire of the Sun is a novel of indeterminate ends and beginnings. It inaugurates Ballard’s partially autobiographical account of war-torn Shanghai (continued in The Kindness of Women). As such, it creates the opportunity to map the abandonment, dereliction, and half-empty swimming pools that recur throughout his fiction, marking the psycho-literary genesis of the Ballardian idiom, an enlightened vantage point from which to reread his entire oeuvre. Furthermore, the novel 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.

Jim’s confrontation with death is irrevocably intensified by the war. Corpses begin to appear to him as litter, just another object made derelict by bombing: ‘[t]he verges were littered with the debris from the air attacks. Burnt-out trucks and supply wagons lay in ditches, surrounded by the bodies of dead puppet soldiers, the carcasses of horses and water buffalo’ (ES, 291). As the occupation begins, Jim observes: ‘[b]odies of Chinese lay everywhere, hands tied behind their backs in the centre of the road, dumped behind the sandbag emplacements, half-severed heads resting on each other’s shoulders’ (ES, 76). Ballard’s matter-of-fact tone, so reminiscent of Crash, remarks upon the self-evident nature of death: through the eyes of a young boy, death is without mystery or terror.

Jim’s proximity to death has always been a close one; corpses are a regular sight even in peacetime. At the beginning of chapter three, Jim plays on a burial tumulus, peering and poking at the sun-warmed skeletons inside: ‘Jim felt his cheeks and jaw, trying to imagine his own skeleton in the sun, lying there in this peaceful field within sight of the aerodrome’ (ES, 29). Jim’s intimacy with the deceased allows his imagination to erode the barrier between the dead and the living; he positions himself within rather than beyond the grave. With ‘the rotting coffins project[ing] from the loose earth like a chest of drawers’ (ES, 29), these re-emerging corpses have an implicitly symmetrical relationship with the novel’s numerous others:

Every night in Shanghai those Chinese too poor to pay for the burial of their relatives would launch the bodies from the funeral piers at Nantao, decking the coffins with paper flowers.Carried away on one tide, they came back on the next, returning to the waterfront ofShanghai with all the other debris abandoned by the city (ES, 41).

Here is a theme that will literally haunt the reader throughout the novel: the uncanny return of the dead. In fact, the novel ends with a vision of inevitable return:

The flowers formed a wavering garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the quays and mud- flats, driven once again to the shores of this terrible city (ES, 351).

It is as if the dead, like memory itself, have an unpredictable capacity to powerfully revisit the living. In the camp graveyard Jim observes: ‘[h]ere and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts’ (ES, 205–206). Burial is a deeply contingent form of waste disposal; a change of weather conditions is all that needed for the discarded to reannounce their presence. Just as a change of wind can bring an unpleasant smell, so heavy rain can exhume the dead. As long as they refuse to be out of sight, the dead continue to ruthlessly occupy our minds.

The ritual of mourning often involves an intricate process of objectification, once the body has been made object it can be made absent, discarded, making death’s absence complete. This is not done purely for emotional reasons. Just as food waste can become hazardous to one’s health if it is not discarded, so the rotting corpse presents a threat. So when Jim drinks from the river, with the corpse of a Chinese woman only fifty yards away, he ‘[c]autiously, [...] decanted a little water from one palm to the other, then drank quickly so that the germs would have no time to infect him’ (ES, 90). Nevertheless, the corpse also poses a threat to the psychological health of the living. For Julia Kristeva, the corpse is the absolute essence of the polluting abject, the ‘decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is indistinguishable from the symbolic-the corpse represents the fundamental pollution’ [17]. In a similar vein, Françoise Dastur has argued that ‘the corpse occupies a disconcerting intermediate position between persons and things and, on account of its corruptibility, is regarded as a source of pollution’ [18]. If the cadaver is the ‘fundamental’ object of abjection and pollution, then it follows that it must represent a form of fundamental or ‘ultimate’ waste, an act of disposal that maintains both the physical and psychological health of the living.

Flies swarm and buzz about them about the corpses that fill the final chapters of Empire of the Sun, greedily profiting from the lack of organised burial or disposal. As both prophets of and fanfares for the physical presence of death, flies enjoy a structurally integral position in the novel’s unique taxonomy of waste. When Jim first meets the wandering Kamikaze pilot he observes: ‘[t]he flies hovered around the pilot’s mouth, tapping his lips like impatient guests at a banquet [...] the Japanese made no move to brush them away. No doubt he knew that his own life was over .’.. (ES, 280–281). When he meets the pilot for the second time, dead on the riverbank, Jim must see him through a ‘swarm of flies’, one of whom ‘drank from [the pilot's] pupil’ (ES, 339). Counterbalancing this sense of enormous waste, Ballard’s flies are ferocious feeders. The corpses encourage ‘a plague of a thousand glutted flies’, flies who devour the very air (ES, 309, 336). In a scene that undeniably contains echoes of the 10th floor swimming pool in High-Rise, Jim returns to Lunghua camp to discover that ‘a cloud of flies enveloped him [...] Brushing the flies from his mouth, Jim walked into the men’s ward. The decaying air streamed down the plywood walls, bathing the flies that fed on the bodies piled across the bunks [...] like sides of meat in a condemned slaughterhouse’ (ES, 302). Flies profit from the decay of humans. As detrivores they are dependent upon on our discards: one creatures waste is another’s want, and disturbingly, flies will not let us ‘go to waste’. Our carefully constructed divisions between clean and unclean, waste and want, become sullied under the promiscuous attention of the fly. More than simply disrupting categories of value, flies wield the power to locate waste and, most unsettling of all, the capacity to identify humans as waste. As Steven Connor has written: ‘[f]lies and humans are asymmetrically deterritorializing [...] Flies and humans are each other’s parasite or interference. Each gives the other its unbeing’ [19]. If the human corpse announces a form of ultimate or essential waste in Empire of Sun, then flies, the very species that profit from this waste, constitute a means of conceptualising a form of ‘impossible’ waste. The fly is one of the few species that remains entirely intractable to human mastery or design: ‘for humans, there is no disposing of or dispensing with flies’ [20]. The fly ridden corpse provides a consummate image of human powerlessness, expressing the essential transience of human life; the waste we all become in the Christian burial service: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’.

IV. Conclusion

As Jim lies in the stadium with Mr Maxted’s corpse, he makes an implicit judgement about exactly when Maxted’s body becomes waste: ‘[l]ong after Mr Maxted had grown cold, Jim had continued to massage his cheeks, keeping away the flies until he was sure that his soul had left him’ (ES, 272). We have already been told that Jim is an amateur soul-spotter, ‘[h]e often watched the eyes of the patients as they died, trying to detect a flash of light when the soul left’ (ES, 207). When Maxted’s body becomes vacant, the flies are permitted to feed. In a profound way, the ‘flash of light’ that announces the moment when Maxted’s body becomes waste resonates with the consequences of the atomic age. The phrase is tellingly repeated when Jim sees the atomic flash from the Nagasaki bomb: ‘a flash of light filled the stadium’ (ES, 276). If a ‘flash of light’ is all that prevents Maxted from becoming waste, then Ballard emphasises how the whole human race teeters dangerously on the brink of absolute destruction, in one flash of light civilisation can be laid waste.

In this way, Empire of the Sun marks the beginning of the atomic era, inaugurating the possibility that the human race can come to a sudden and violent end. With their shared interest in abrupt and unexpected renegotiations of value, High Rise, Concrete Island and Crash all share this revelation of potential apocalypse. The minute and the enormous, the antique and the everyday, the built environment and the natural, the organic and the inorganic; Ballard allows every aspect of modernity to be transferred into waste. Ballardian waste is so ubiquitous that what we ordinarily view as secret and hidden becomes the abundantly normal, a permanent feature of our lived environment. Far from being a useless nuisance that we would prefer to discard as our past, the figure and the figuring of waste provides the central metaphor for our present. Ballard’s work stands in the indelible afterglow of the flash, the flash of waste creation that is the very hallmark of our age.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II last week, Part III this week.

Endnotes

[1] To avoid confusion between J. G. Ballard the author and James Ballard the central character of Crash, I will refer to the character as ‘James’.

[2] J. G. Ballard, Crash (1975; London: Vintage, 1995), 19. Hereafter, cited in the text as C.

[3] Interestingly, there is an additional sense of abandonment and worthlessness, see ‘Brothel’, The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed, 2002).

[4] J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (London: Flamingo, 1997), 262.

[5] See Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, 119–50, for an account of Crash‘s place in the long thematic and narratalogical development of Ballard’s fiction.

[6] Dalia Judovitz, The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (2001; Michigan: U of Michigan P, 2004), 67-82.

[7] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 53.

[8] See Henry Gray, Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical (1858; Bristol: Paragon, 1998), 546-56.

[9] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 72.

[10] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 103, 103-104.

[11] J. G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’, Crash, n.p.

[12 For two excellent overviews on the relationship between Ballard and Baudrillard, see: Emma Whiting, ''Abject Literature': Disaffection and abjection in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, ' unpublished essay, 2007; Roger Luckhurst, 'The Angle Between Two Walls': The Fiction of J. G. Ballard.

[13] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 141.

[14] Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, 123

[15 J. G. Ballard, interview with Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.

[16] J. G. Ballard, interview with Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.

[17] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 109.

[18] Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. John Llewelyn (1994; London: Althone, 1996), 8.

[19] Steven Connor, Fly, (London: Reaktion, 2006), 182, 183.

[20] Steven Connor, Fly, 183.

Bibliography

Primary

Ballard, J. G. Concrete Island. 1973. London: Vintage, 1994.
—. Crash. 1975. London: Vintage, 1995.
—. Empire of the Sun. 1984. London: Panther, 1985
—. High Rise. 1975. London: Flamingo, 2000.
—. Interview with Melvyn Bragg. The South Bank Show. ITV1. 17 Sept. 2006.
—. ‘The Ultimate City’. The Complete Short Stories. London: Flamingo, 2001.
—. A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews. London: Flamingo, 1997.

Secondary

Appadurai, Arjun. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appaduri. 1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 3-63.

Brigg, Peter. J. G. Ballard. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1985.

Connor, Steven. Fly. London: Reaktion, 2006.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gaytatari Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. 1966. London: Routledge, 2002.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972

Gasiorek, Andrzej. J. G. Ballard. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005.

Hawkins, Gay, and Stephen Muecke. ‘Introduction: Cultural Economies of Waste’. Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Ed. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. ix-xxvi.

Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. 1977. London: Academy, 1989.

Joedike, Jürgen. Architecture Since 1945: Sources and Directions. Trans. J. C. Plames. London: Pall Mall Press, 1969.

Judovitz, Dalia. The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. 2001. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 2004.

Kolnai, Aurel. ‘Disgust’. On Disgust. 1929. Ed. and Trans. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer. Chicago: Open Court, 2004. 29-92.

Kopytoff, Igor. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’ The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appaduri. 1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 64-91.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. 1980. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Fredrick Engels. Vol.1 .1954; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977.

Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

Luckhurst, Roger. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1997.

Rathje, William, and Cullen Murphy. Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage. 1992. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001.

Rubin, William S. Dada and Surrealist Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. ‘Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics’. The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. 1998. Abington: Routledge, 2006. 37-57.

Short, Robert. Dada and Surrealism. London: Octopus, 1980.

Scanlan, John. Garbage. London: Reaktion, 2005.

Thompson, Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.

Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New Studies in Aesthetics 37. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

Whiting, Emma. ”Abject Literature’: Disaffection and Abjection in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash‘. Unpublished essay, 2007.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II here, Part III there.

William Viney, © 2007.

I. Waste and Value.

Waste undeniably concerns notions of value and meaning: what is retained and preserved is valued; what is discarded, banished, and abjected is devalued [1]. Waste therefore marks implicit boundaries, articulates dynamic categories, and stratifies objects into orders of value. Yet these orders of meaning and significance are by no means static. Rubbish, refuse and litter are expressions of complex systems in perpetual motion: representing different things, to different people, at different times. This semantic contingency is the product of an aesthetic, economic, biological, and socio-political “discursive constellation” [2] that is forever in flux. The subject of waste requires therefore an interdisciplinary approach. We must adopt a critical apparatus flexible enough to trace the intricately intersecting discursive nodes that generate and maintain value.

Though cultural order and taste might at first appear to be rigid and long established, it in fact requires endless renewal and recreation, re-enacted through individual and collective forces. From a structural anthropologist’s point of view, rubbish is a dynamic social force. For Mary Douglas, it is the clean and orderly that represents the static and immobile, whilst dirt, rubbish, and refuse contain a covert revolutionary potential, harbouring a power to contest the static stability upon which order depends. As Douglas has noted, “[d]irt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment” [3]. Waste or rubbish (synonyms of dirt for Douglas) maintain order, through the binary logic of the devalued Other. Simultaneously, waste contests that order, as it threatens to become a valued object. As this brief theoretical excursion illustrates, the value of waste is far from absolute. The changing values given to objects lend them tumultuous life, making possible a “cultural biography of things” [4]. If we begin to think about J. G. Ballard’s cultural biography of objects, we are immediately struck by his unerring focus on the final chapters, the closing pages that mark the transition into, and out of, the category of ‘waste.’ Even more peculiar, Ballard’s ‘biography’ of things never fully ends, his waste frequently returns as want, merging end and beginning, creation and destruction.

Michael Thompson, one of the earliest theorists of waste, has divided objects into two categories: ‘transient’ objects (e.g. a car) with a finite life span which decrease in value as time progresses; whilst ‘durable’ objects (e.g. antique furniture) have prolonged life spans, and their value increases as time progresses. Our attitude towards an object greatly depends on our ability to place it into one of these categories; our financial energies will be thrown into the conservation (through insurance, maintenance, presentation etc.) of the durable object, whilst we will happily destroy or discard the transient object. Thompson goes on to argue that there is a shadowy and covert third term: ‘rubbish.’ Although a transient object may fall into the ‘rubbish’ (or waste) category it may, by good fortune, fortitude, or human intervention, re-emerge with durable credentials. Waste as a social category of value is therefore intimately bound to fluid transfers of value, a category of flexibility and mutability [5]. Most notable in Ballard’s fiction is the absence of Thompsonian durability, to borrow another phrase from Thompson; Ballard’s world is a “world of transience.” For Ballard, waste registers a process, a cycle, a movement, and system in transition: durability and permanence have no place in a fictional world that revels in the power of waste to negotiate and renegotiate value.

II. Architectures of Waste: High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City”

The changing character of the city, and the casual effects these changes have upon the individual and collective psyches of its populace, are powerfully rendered in High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City”. All three contain familiar visual landscapes: the high-rise apartment building, the roadside waste ground, the empty Central Business District. However, each of these recognisable aspects of urban experience is rendered unfamiliar through the pervasive renegotiation of waste categories. Unexpected reversals propel each narrative on unknown trajectories: the brand new high-rise becomes derelict, the waste ground becomes habitable, the abandoned city centre thrives once more. In each case, values and priorities transform themselves, giving way to new orders of social organisation and new systems of commerce. What is considered rubbish finds itself similarly reconfigured, as radical new ecologies of consumption and rejection are tried and tested. Waste hovers at the fringes in a ubiquitous and deeply ambivalent manner, at all times it threatens to upset traditional categories of value. As waste becomes accepted, even loved, Ballard shows how our environment conditions notions of waste, want, and value.

In High-Rise, Ballard questions the bold ambition of high modernist architecture. These building projects implicitly communicate concepts of cleanliness and waste management, furthering a techno-modernist form of social engineering [6]. At the core of post-war redevelopment were notions of reclamation and redevelopment. Progressive ultramodern housing rose from the derelict slums and industrial wastelands. This is a context with which Ballard’s fiction patently interacts:

Together [the apartment blocks] were set in a mile-square area of abandoned dockland and warehousing along the north bank of the river [...] The massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation in the bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the rundown areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation [7].

Dominating the architectural scene of 1960s and 1970s Britain, the Brutalist school confronted inner city decline, bombed-out post-war dereliction, and industrial decline, with a clinical rationalism. As Jürgen Joedike has made clear, the Smithsonian-Brutalist movement privileged ethical and social architectural principles over the aesthetic. Precise geometry, ‘honest’ (i.e. visible) use of materials, and a dedication to the striking ‘image,’ were seen to create buildings both progressive and pure, in function and form [8]. The ultra-rationalist/behaviourist ideals that the Brutalists inherited from architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe meant that the high-rise was intended as a means to cleanse post-war Britain of its social ills, literally cleaning up the neighbourhood through a minimalist economy of space. A utopian relationship with technology fostered a correspondingly technocratic architecture:

for the machine supported present-day cities, only a live, cool, highly controlled, rather impersonal architectural language can deepen that base-connection, make it resonate with culture as a whole [9].

Peter Smithson’s Futurist aesthetic becomes playfully inverted in Ballard’s high-rise. Whilst the building begins as “a huge machine designed to serve [...] a never-failing supply of care and attention” (HR, 10), the ‘machine’ comes to a shuddering collapse, taking with it the moral stability of its residents. The absolute failure of the high-rise permits the exploration of previously repressed psychological phenomenon: tribal violence, sexual promiscuity, and open vandalism.

The high-rise’s aggressive environment encourages a competitive decadence that allows valuable objects to become transformed into waste – shows of wealth, irresponsibility, and indifference gather around acts of disposal. Drinking “a brand of expensive imitation champagne” in the morning, and throwing a full bottle, “still with its wired cork and foil in place,” off the balcony, powerfully demonstrates the violent waste-making of the affluent classes (HR, 11, 12). It is this self-conscious creation of waste that is endlessly paraded throughout the novel. Laing’s mild annoyance towards his inconsiderate neighbours is far less interesting than his decision to dispose of the remnants of the champagne bottle in an identical manner as the revellers above, by throwing it over his balcony’s balustrade. Individual waste becomes socialised, the category of waste is contagious.

Fittingly, Laing’s first altercation with a fellow resident is over a blocked rubbish-disposal chute. He and Steele soon unite however, as they unblock the chute and discuss the peculiar waste disposal habits of the upper floor residents. At this early stage in the novel, the presence of waste is already expressing the transient relations people hold with their refuse:

Steele stood back as the column of garbage sank below in a greasy avalanche. He held Laing’s arm, steering him around a beer can lying on the corridor floor. ‘Still no doubt we’re all equally guilty — I hear that the lower floors people are leaving small parcels of garbage outside their apartment door’ (HR, 39).

The telling manipulation of language here suggests a deliberate, perhaps ritualistic, negotiation and renegotiation of waste values, and this merely marks the beginning of what becomes an obsession. Ballard’s incessant cataloguing of rubbish becomes a towering feature of his narrative. A careful balance is struck between waste avoidance (clearing the chute and steering round the beer can) and waste acceptance (parcels of rubbish left in communal spaces), a balance that will steadily break down through the course of the novel. Any quaint delicacy that “small parcels” might suggest becomes obliterated as the rubbish heaps up, inside and outside the building. Anthony Royal, the building’s architect, observes from his top-floor apartment a “sea of rubbish that spread[s] around the building like an enlarging stain” (HR, 76). This spreading sea, for Royal and the reader, is a “visible index of the block’s decline,” a physical measure of “the extent to which its tenants accepted this process of erosion” (HR, 76). At first tolerated, then accepted without acknowledgment, and finally embraced as a truer state of being, the residents’ changing relations with rubbish is an important barometer of social change; a mirror that reflects the collective mental health of the high-rise.

The steady accumulation of rubbish is symptomatic of an eroded boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ The high-rise retains an inexplicable hold upon the psyches of the residents, they reject the outside world entirely. For example, despite growing hardships, Royal observes: “they would not be leaving either the following morning or any other” (HR, 78). He dreams of an architecture with “no possibility of escape” (HR, 81). In their rejection of the outside world, Royal and his fellow residents testify to the success of self-containment. The waste and dirt of the high-rise insulate the residents against an outside that has become increasingly unattractive, detached, unreal. After attempting to go to work and getting only as far as the car park before turning back, Laing realises he will never again try to leave (HR, 104). Coupled with the bizarre psychological control the high-rise holds over its residents, the physical properties of the high-rise means that waste cannot escape either. An architecture that prioritises the vertical over the horizontal means that spatial boundaries are reordered. The high-rise has no discernable centre, or rather, the whole building is a giant centre. Similarly, each apartment has no discernable periphery, the front door simply leads further into the main building. The “small parcels of garbage” left outside the apartment door speak of the contested nature of private space in a high-rise apartment block. With this space contested, the sense of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ become similarly obscured. With a clearly identifiable ‘outside’ lost, the boundary between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ is blurred, complicating the spatial distinctions implicit in ‘throwing things out.’ Even though the residents might try to throw their rubbish off their balconies, Royal still observes waste that appears as a “sea” and a “stain.” Both words express the impossibility of disconnecting the building from its waste: “[a] greasy spray hung across the face of the building, the residue of the cascade of debris now heaved over the side without a care whether the wind would carry it into the apartments below” (HR, 97). Laing tries to clean his flat only to discover that “all he was doing was rearranging the dirt” (HR, 100). With its complication of spatial divides, the high-rise renders waste uncanny – in perpetual circulation, forever threatening to return to sender.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

If waste defines space (and vice versa) through the generation of physical and conceptual boundaries then the sense that refuse has lost its ‘correct’ place registers the renegotiation of these boundaries, and perhaps the renegotiation of waste categories in general. The most intimate and domestic spaces, such as the kitchen and bed, become unexpected rubbish tips. In fact, Laing finds himself in his kitchen bedding down on bags of rubbish:

[H]e realised how derelict it had become. The floor was strewn with debris, scraps of food and empty cans. To his surprise, Laing counted six garbage-sacks — for some reason he had assumed there was only one [...] Reclining against this soft bed of his own waste he felt like going to sleep (HR, 100).

Laing’s indifference to these heaps of rubbish are neither the signs of laziness or the failure of the buildings’ technology, but rather, proof that his values are at a considerable remove from those that prompted him to throw the broken wine bottle off his balcony. His dramatic change in attitude towards waste is “to be welcomed [it] helped to expose a more real vision of himself” (HR, 100). Similarly, Royal observes the unwillingness of his residents to dispose of their sacks of rubbish:

Presumably they held this rubbish to themselves less from fear of attracting the attentions of the outside world than from the need to cling to their own, surround themselves with the mucilage of unfinished meals, bloody bandage scraps, broken bottles that once held the wine that made them drunk, all faintly visible through the semi-opaque plastic (HR, 137).

It is difficult to say when exactly our waste ceases to belong to us. The residents believe that by throwing their rubbish over the rails they lose an aspect of themselves. In this sense, when we discard an object we in fact give birth to, or create something, that we can cherish, creatively expressing an aspect of ourselves. Put simply: a truer connection with one’s waste offers a truer sense of the self, a reversal of the unreal disposable society that dominates the metropolis beyond the buildings’ limits. The logical conclusion of this attitude is a richer relationship with one’s own bodily wastes: “the stench gave him confidence, the feeling that he had dominated the terrain with the products of his own body” (HR, 107). As will become clear in Concrete Island, Crash, and Empire of the Sun, Ballard uses the body as a site and object of ‘ultimate’ waste — the Alpha and Omega of the discarded. High-Rise has its own peculiar twist on this theme, a twist only fully appreciated if, bizarrely, we go via the swimming pool.

Perhaps the most Ballardian of images, the declining status of the swimming pool is a dependable measure of narrative progress: it provides a flexible and mobile metaphor that leaps from narrative to narrative. Almost all of Ballard’s novels contain a swimming pool in one form or another. In Cocaine Nights the crowded swimming pool is symbol of violent regeneration. The empty pools of Hello America powerfully represent the shortage of water that has left the twentieth century empty and derelict, making Western civilisation seem laughably futile. In Empire of the Sun Jim’s crystal clear pool empties itself at the same rate that the expatriate community are evacuated: ” [t]he water was covered with leaves and dead insects, and the level had fallen by almost three feet, draping a scummy curtain on the sides. Cigarettes ends lay crushed on the white tiles, and a Chinese packet lay under the diving board” [10]. In a subtle way, the refuse that the Chinese soldiers have left suggests a form of colonisation, a politicised reclamation of space through rubbish.

In a more startling correspondence, the changing fortunes of the high-rise and the relative cleanliness of the building’s swimming pools are directly correlated. Apart from the waste disposal-chute incident analysed above, the swimming pool is the original place of conflict in the high-rise, where the separate levels begin to divide themselves into a series of primitive castes. The first incident involves an argument between a cost-accountant from the 17th floor and Mrs Wilder. The cost-accountant accuses Mrs Wilder’s children of repeatedly urinating in the pool. Aside from the comic images this evokes, it sets in motion a spiralling series of additional incidents, culminating in the death of the jeweller. As the children are banished from the sullied swimming pool the lower-levels retaliate by drowning an Afghan hound owned by an upper floor resident. What Ballard terms the “contamina[tion]” and “profanation” of the pool again announces a more specific objective correlative for the psychological health of the high-rise. The pool, like the building as a whole, is already progressing from a space of decadent leisure to one of violent contamination and waste.

The decline of the swimming pool is gradual yet entropic; “a half-empty pit of yellowing water and floating debris” (HR, 75) soon becomes “yellowing water [...] filled with debris, the floor of the shallow end emerging like a beach in a garbage lagoon. A mattress floated among the bottles, surrounded by a swill of cardboard cartons and newspapers” (HR, 88). After this, the 35th floor pool has a lengthy absence until it reappears: “[t]wo bodies, he noted, floated in the pool, barely distinguishable from the other debris, the kitchen garbage and pieces of furniture” (HR, 159). Both pools have become established unofficial dumps, places where both kitchen waste and human bodies can be discarded with equal ease. This disturbing image acts as a mere prelude to the climactic description of the 10th floor swimming pool:

In the yellow light reflected off the greasy tiles, the long tank of the bone-pit stretched in front of them. The water had long since drained away, but the sloping floor was covered with the skulls, bones and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses. Tangled together where they had been flung, they lay about like tenants of a crowded beach visited by a sudden holocaust (HR, 170).

This is perhaps the ‘ultimate waste’ generated by the high-rise’s harsh environment. With the Jewish Holocaust as a historical intertext, we are reminded how easily humans can discard one another on an unthinkable scale. True to the earlier observation that, “for all their descent into barbarism, the residents remained faithful to their origins and continued to generate a vast amount of refuse” (HR, 134), the numerous bodies that fill the pool are the systemic waste products of a building, a community, and the individual, in a state of absolute collapse. In a more sinister way, the body pit presents an extension of the unshakeable late-capitalist tendency towards disposability. Ballard’s dystopian vision of architectural modernity suggests a salient and unrelenting feature that transcends seismic social change: the generation of waste.

With the precise details of an autobiography, Concrete Island situates itself very specifically within time (at exactly 3 o’clock April 22nd 1973) and place (six hundred yards from the junction of the Westway and the M4). Richard Maitland’s car tyres explode and send him careering into a forgotten wasteland, setting forth a narrative imbued with the indisputable force of possibility. This piece of derelict land has been created and disremembered, hidden and neglected. Its true origins are made deliberately ambiguous, an ambiguity provoked by Ballard’s enigmatic and exacting style: “a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes” [11]. Whilst the familiar term “traffic island” suggests the immediate designs of motorway planners and municipal bureaucrats, “waste ground” creates a contrary and implicit opposition, a sense of chance and contingency: an incidental systemic by-product of humanity’s need for transportation. This concrete island is not only “sealed off from the world around it by the high embankments on two sides and the wire-mesh fence on its third” (CI, 13), but is also “a forgotten island of rubble and weeds” (CI, 5). With “the world around it,” the waste ground is a non-space, deliberately sealed and excluded from the social and economic norms of the everyday. Yet Ballard’s insistence on the term “island” presents a powerful force of naturalisation, with all the associated notions of colonisation and empire, primitivism and pioneer living. As these brief extracts already suggest, Concrete Island is a novel obsessed with the junctures between the created and the artificial, natural and unnatural, the familiar and unfamiliar, the valued and the discarded.

Compounding an endless flux between binaries is the lingering remnants of the island’s archaeology, which has been described by Andrzej Gasiorek as a “physical palimpsest” [12]. Maitland traces the outline of what was once a Victorian terraced street, discovering the ruins of an abandoned church, graveyard, and print shop, with the littered type of an old letterpress still scattered on the ground (CI, 41, 65). We glimpse traces of the island’s hidden history, a history made archaeology by post-war demolition squads and an emerging desire for high-speed travel. All this Victorian certainty has become waste, both by design and neglect. The durable old world has been replaced by a transient new world. The shifting fortunes of what was once a habitable and thriving environment, stable enough to support a church, print shop, and cinema, gives emphasis to the ephemeral nature of land use and value. An uncertain duality between the created and the forgotten is tirelessly reinstated, Maitland’s environment becomes loaded with both a benevolent domestic potential and a desolate wasted malevolence, and it is between these binaries our traditional valuations of wastelands are wilfully disrupted.

What is so remarkable about the island on which Maitland finds himself is its resistance to straightforward categorisation. By successfully existing as island, waste ground, Victorian ruin, “unofficial municipal dump” (CI, 13), and the home of Jane and Proctor, this space retains a robust semantic multiplicity. If we choose to agree with Ballard’s speculative observation that “this triangular patch of waste ground had survived by exercise of guile and persistence, and would continue to survive, unknown and disregarded, long after the motorways had collapsed into dust” (CI, 69), then we must also acknowledge its semantic undecidability as an important contributing factor to this persistence [13]. Maitland’s grim assessment of his island as an “abandoned ground,” no more than “meaningless soil” (CI, 32), does not merely express his frustration with being marooned, rather, it communicates his thwarted desire to give his environment meaning; to give this space a proper language, and a proper name.

If Maitland’s island represents a sort of non-space, without unequivocal value, then we should be unsurprised by the catalogues of seemingly formless refuse piled at the island’s boundaries. With these, Ballard gives his 1970s wasteland a sense of impossible borderlands, populated by the miscellaneous and discarded. The following passages are typical:

[a] wire-mesh fence sealed off the triangle of waste ground from the area beyond, which had become an unofficial municipal dump. In the shadows below the concrete span were several derelict furniture vans, a stack of stripped-down billboards, mounds of tyres and untreated metal refuse. (CI, 12-13).

No grass grew under the overpass. The damp earth was dark with waste oil leaking from the piles of refuse and broken metal drums on the far side of the fence. The hundred-yard-long wire wall held back mounds of truck tyres and empty cans, broken office furniture, sacks of hardened cement. Builder’s forms, bales of rusty wire and scrapped engine parts were heaped so high that Maitland doubted whether he would be able to penetrate this jungle of refuse even if he could cut through the fence (CI, 39).

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

Although both extracts technically describe an area beyond the small triangle ground that Maitland inhabits, this is no less instructive. As the eastern end of the triangle is the only side not lined with a solid, insurmountable motorway embankment, it presents the only viable means to escape, yet Maitland observes a “jungle of refuse” that forms a third embankment, a wall of waste that effectively completes his isolation. Paradoxically, the waste ground is given boundaries through heaps of refuse, but the inherent chaos of these heaps serves only to obscure the islands’ beginning and end. The wire fence can only form a tenuous and explicitly porous screen between the ‘wanted’ and the ‘wasted’; the leaking oil signifies their fragile, if not impossible, division.

Just as discarded objects pile up in Concrete Island, so too does socially discarded people. Richard Maitland, a successful architect, is thrown into a wasteland, perhaps never to escape. Proctor, after injuring himself in the circus, has been made mercilessly unemployed: ” ‘They just threw him out’ ” (CI, 98), whilst Jane, once wealthy, married, and pregnant, has become a drug-using prostitute [14]. It is through the island’s three inhabitants that we are made aware of the fluid movement between success and failure, the harsh downside to a socially mobile population. Ballard describes them as “[t]hree derelicts” (CI, 109), and “outcasts” (CI, 114). Their social identities become fused with the status of the island:

Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body. He gestured towards them, trying to make a circuit of the island so that he could leave these sections of himself where they belonged (CI, 70).

The island harnesses a powerful ability to fragment, making Maitland wish he could discard the aspects of himself that have become useless: in a similar passage, frustrated with his damaged leg Maitland wishes “he could disconnect” and “throw it away” (CI, 127). In Ballard’s deeply critical manner, Maitland has become fully absorbed into disposable culture; a culture that has made and populated the island, a culture that is predicated on throwing away anything that is inconvenient or uncomfortable. Along with the haunting reminders of Jane’s aborted child, Ballard strikes deep into a society that complacently accepts the human body as a form of waste, as something to be discarded along with the cigarette packets and empty bottles.

Although the pervasive culture of the disposable may shape and populate the island, this should not detract from the fluctuating categories of value that prevents rubbish from becoming an entirely static order of meaning. Instances of scavenging and recycling galvanise Concrete Island’s Crusoe-like ‘survival-narrative,’ connecting the novel to a long history of travel fiction. But unlike the great majority of canonical shipwrecked heroes, Maitland must rely on an artificial and redundant landscape for sustenance. His need to recycle gives great testimony to the dynamic aspects of Thompsonian rubbish theory, a subtle implosion of categories that suggests a continuous renegotiation of value.

The novel’s first instance of recycling occurs where he wrenches off a piece of exhaust piping from his wrecked car to fashion a crude six-foot long crutch. In a peculiar way, his car continues to give him mobility, or rather, it is recycled waste that makes his hobbling exploration of the island possible (CI, 32). No less remarkable are Maitland’s desperate attempts to catch the attention of passing drivers, firstly by setting the car alight to make a beacon, and secondly by using the car’s blackened wiring as writing material (CI, 51, 61). Although he fails to attract anyone’s attention his recycling is nonetheless successful, transforming the wreck into a crutch, a torch, and a pen.

As Maitland establishes himself on the island, the opportunities to utilise its rich resources multiply. Proctor shows him the island’s main food-source, the fly-tipped kitchen waste of a local restaurant:

[A]n amorphous mass of gleaming mucilage which lay in a three-feet-high heap across a stack of tyres. The nearest edge of this sludge-pile was already oozing through the mesh [...] Proctor picked at the slices of wet bread, lumps of fatty meat and vegetable scraps embedded in the greasy avalanche (CI, 128).

This complex (and comparatively rare) use of consonance and assonance indicates a clear intention to shock. Phrases such as “gleaming mucilage,” “sludge-pile,” and “greasy avalanche,” emphasises the decaying viscosity of this “illicit garbage dump” (CI, 128). Yet this fetid feast leaves Maitland profoundly unaffected: “he felt no sense of revulsion” (CI, 128). The episode is remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allows the island a habitable benevolence, with a moderately reliable source of food Maitland’s colonisation becomes possible. Secondly, it illustrates an important revolution in value. The fatty lumps and sodden dregs register the excesses of Western consumerism, at first considered waste, once again finds value in the mess tins of Maitland and Proctor. Finally, it provides a significant example of how powerful emotions of disgust can act as organising principles behind categories of value. William Miller has argued that disgust is an emotion that “ranks people and things in a kind of cosmic ordering” [15]. Therefore, Maitland’s loss of disgust announces a cosmic, or rather, a holistic reordering of value. His rotten heap of food scraps corresponds to what the German phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai has called the “prototype of all disgusting objects”; the sight, smell, or taste of putrification; “the tactile impression of flabbiness, sliminess, pastiness, and indeed anything soft…” [16]. Similarly, Julia Kristeva argues that food loathing is “the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” [17]. But, if we accept that the abjection of objects in part constitutes the Lacanian “I”, where the expelled object affirms and consolidates the formation of the self-becoming subject, then Maitland’s acceptance of waste suggests the reversal of this process, signifying both an unravelling and restructuring of the self. Via the consumption of waste, an emerging identity is therefore articulated. Through the assimilation of previously abject(ed) material Maitland becomes waste, and waste becomes him.

The novel’s powerful depiction of ‘wasted living’ — the domestication of and through waste — finds climactic resolution when Proctor creates Maitland a “pavilion of rust” (CI, 162); a crude house made of the discarded sections of cars. In a deeply ambivalent way, Jane observes: “I can see that you’re a real architect” (CI, 163). Has Maitland achieved a truer sense of ‘reality’? Does a recycled eco-architecture present a viable antidote to the unreal high-rises that dominate the urban skyline? Are Jane’s words a sarcastic commentary on Maitland’s dramatic fall from grace? The presence of waste makes these questions both possible and irresolvable. The fluid transactions between categories of value obscure a critical overview. Critics have often preferred to stress the dystopian aspects of the novel. Gasiorek writes that the island is a “symbol of the waste and destruction modernity leaves in its wake,” Peter Brigg calls the work a “disaster novel,” and Roger Luckhurst writes of the “uncanny wasted margins or ruins of a forgotten twentieth century history” [18]. Ballard’s Concrete Island typically engenders thematically negative readings; nowhere is the novel’s latent utopian content, seen in the regenerative treatment of waste, given an opportunity to redress this imbalance. The tragi-comic ambiguity of Maitland’s fate depends on our acceptance of the island as a viable space in which to live. Should we accept this, as Maitland certainly does, then we must radically reappraise our hierarchies of value and acknowledge the hidden potential to be found in the discarded.

If High-Rise and Concrete Island generate and explore myths of the present, “The Ultimate City” tells a myth of the near future, an exploration of how the future will look upon our present. Raised in the post-industrial ‘Garden City,’ Halloway becomes captivated by the world his parents left behind. Using the flying competition as a thinly veiled excuse, he builds a sailplane and reaches the other side of the sound to explore the metropolis: “an abandoned dream ready to be re-occupied” [19]. He discovers systems of waste built upon an aggressive use of power and materials, an economic unsustainability predicated upon massive overproduction and consumption, only to be abandoned on an equivalent scale. Not only does Halloway reoccupy a wasteland and a derelict high-rise, but an entire metropolis. He re-inhabits a discarded twentieth-century.

The defining contrast of the novella opposes the docile pastoralism of the Garden City on the one hand, and the aggressive petroleum-driven industrialism of the abandoned metropolis on the other. The Garden City’s manufacturers are so exact that “everything [is] so well made that it last[s] for ever” (CSS, 879), what refuse is produced is efficiently recycled. The metropolis is an enormous monument to the culture of the discard, a wasteland strewn with abandoned cars, televisions, washing machines, and other commodities. Through Halloway’s regeneration of the long abandoned city, the narrative asks crucial questions about the material legacies of technologically advanced societies, the transient nature of material culture, and the futile ambitions of Western industrialism. His ability to playfully master the systems of a distant twentieth-century tie into processes of reconciliation and self-exploration, allowing him to come to terms with his insatiable desire for power and waste.

The aptly named Buckmaster, the ageing industrialist Halloway meets in the metropolis, represents the industrial glut of Fordist production. With an emphasis upon disproportionate material accumulation, surplus and excess, Buckmaster describes his golden age:

During the war I built thirty thousand fighters for the government, we were turning them out so fast the Air Force kept the war going just to get rid of them… [and] … enough spare parts to give every man on this planet his own robot-assembly kit (CSS, 896).

Ballard gives us a clear sense of the motive and morals of the old world, constantly reflected in the enormous volume of discarded goods: “[i]n the open fields a local manufacturer had dumped what appeared to be a lifetime’s output of washing machines” (CSS, 879); “[t]housands of cars lined the streets, their flamboyant bodywork covered with moss” (CSS, 882). The size of production and consequent abandonment is enigmatically captured in Miranda and Buckmaster’s waste sculptures:

As he stepped down from the pedestrian exit, he noticed that a nearby parking lot had been used as a municipal dump. Old tyres, industrial waste and abandoned appliances lay about in a rusty moraine. Rising from its centre was a pyramid of television sets some sixty feet high, constructed with considerable care and an advanced geometry (CSS, 883-884).

With their direct association with the monuments of ancient civilisations, these heaps of consumer durables hold an arresting power [20]. Although they represent objects drained of use and exchange values and made useless through abandonment, they demonstrate a nostalgically aestheticised form of memorialisation. This is most powerfully demonstrated in Buckmaster’s “cathedral of cars” (CSS, 897), a four hundred foot monument made entirely of cars, and the largest of the city’s pyramids of waste. Halloway observes that this pyramid “resembled a gothic cathedral” (CSS, 895). These physical epitaphs to Western civilisation hold an implicit relationship with Dada, and to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades.’ Like Dada, these towering monuments of rust express a clear rejection of rationalist humanist principles, elevating mundane objects as works of art and debasing works of art to the level of mundane objects [21]. Duchamp argued that his readymades were created to inspire “a reaction of visual indifference [...] a total absence of good or bad taste, in fact, a complete anesthesia” [22]. Of course, the last thing Duchamp’s shock-tactics inspire is critical affectlessness, his Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Fountain (1917) still attract debate. More accurately, Duchamp’s readymades challenge our traditional tools of analysis, obscuring the distinctions between art and the everyday, the aesthetised and the ordinary [23]. Buckmaster’s ‘cathedral’ represents an extension of Duchamp’s Dadaist ideals, generating something far more elaborate than an ‘architecture of waste.’ The pyramid allows a complex network of competing uses and meanings to collide, a nuanced mixture of object d’art, monument, memorial, and deification of waste. Rubbish, rather than the simple by-product of a forgotten economic system, is figured as the very symbolic locus of that system. All this is achieved through the very materials that the monument seeks to celebrate, waste is used to glorify waste. A very specific brand of mise en abime is created, collapsing important interpretative binaries such as the relationship between part and whole, end and beginning, subject and object: the physical and semantic centre of the edifice is therefore rendered disturbingly ambivalent.

The pyramids trigger in Halloway an appreciation for waste that goes far beyond nostalgic mourning, he begins to see the aesthetic desirability of waste. The following extract is arguably one of the novella’s most powerful:

Far from disfiguring the landscape, these discarded products of Twentieth-Century industry had a fierce and wayward beauty. Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal-scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from the abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink. He was fascinated by the cobalt clouds that drifted below the surface of the water, free at last of all the plants and fish, the soft chemical billows interacting as they seeped into the sodden soil. He explored the whorls of steel shavings, foliage culled from a metallic Christmas tree, rusting wire whose dense copper hues formed a burnished forest in the sunlight. He gazed raptly at the chalky whiteness of old china-clay tips, vivid as powdered ice, abandoned railyards with their moss-covered locomotives, the undimmed beauty of industrial wastes produced by skills and imaginations far richer than nature’s, more splendid than any Arcadian meadow. Unlike nature, here was no death. (CSS, 915)

Ballard steers us towards a peculiar version of the Kantian sublime: the common flower can no longer hold Halloway’s attention, only a “fierce and wayward” bricolage of waste can provoke his ‘fascination’ and ‘rapture’ [24]. Whereas in High-Rise and Concrete Island rubbish was embraced for typically utilitarian ends (for food, shelter, domination), Halloway’s appreciation of waste operates on primarily aesthetic terms, abstracted beyond a crass division between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ It might be tempting to dismiss the final line of this extract as mere Ballardian hyperbole. To do so would be to miss the source of wastes unique aesthetic properties. If a bomb were dropped on La Gioconda it would become worthless, if a bomb were dropped on a rubbish tip its visual nature would be altered, but its value would remain unchanged. The visual attractiveness of industrial waste is one that can never be tarnished — its steady decline is the very source of its arresting beauty.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II here, Part III there.

ENDNOTES

[1] I believe Ballard’s treatment of waste runs contrary to John Scanlan’s between garbage and the complete absence of meaning and value; see John Scanlan, Garbage, (London: Reaktion, 2005), 97-98, 112. For Ballard, waste lies on a flexible spectrum of value, ever fluid, mutable, and capricious.

[2] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1969; London: Tavistock, 1972), 66.

[3] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo, (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), 2

[4] Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appaduri (1986; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 64-91.

[5] Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), 9-10.

[6] Ballard’s High-Rise is set in 1970s London Docklands, at the very cusp of gentrification which only gathers its full pace in the 1980s. It is commonly believed that the West End grew to be a desirable and exclusive district because it lay up wind of the slums in the east, the colonisation of the East End by the affluent professional classes in High-Rise supposes a solution to this problem; a solution the novel wilfully destroys.

[7] J. G. Ballard, High-Rise, (1975; London: Flamingo, 2000), 8. Hereafter, cited in the text as HR.

[8] Jürgen Joedike, Architecture Since 1945: Sources and Directions, trans. J. C. Plames, (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), 110-23.

[9] Peter Smithson, quoted in Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, (1977; London: Academy, 1989), 23.

[10] J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun, (1984; London: Panther, 1985), 62. Hereafter, cited in the text as ES.

[11] J. G. Ballard, “Introduction,” Concrete Island, (1973; London: Vintage, 1994), 11. Hereafter, cited in the text as CI.

[12] Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard, (Manchester; Manchester UP, 2005), 113.

[13] Scanlan argues that symbolic and linguistic undecideability is an inevitable characteristic of waste. See On Garbage, 11-53.

[14] The fallen fortunes of the islanders are reflected in Ballard’s appropriation of establishment names. ‘Maitland’ may well be a reference to jurist and historian Frederic William Maitland (1850 – 1906), whilst ‘Proctor’ might refer to astronomer and philosopher Richard Anthony Proctor (1837 – 1888). If this is so, then Ballard takes two eminent Victorians, who worked to uphold legal and natural law, and places them at the mercy of the twentieth century.

[15] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), 2.

[16] Aurel Kolnai, “Disgust,” On Disgust, ed. and trans. Barry Smith, Carolyn Korsmeyer (1929; Chicago; Open Court, 2004), 51, 52.

[17] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (1980; New York; Columbia UP, 1982), 2.

[18] Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard, 108, Peter Brigg, J. G. Ballard, (Mercer Island, WA; Starmont House, 1985), 68, Roger Luckhurst. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, (Liverpool; Liverpool UP, 1997), 132.

[19] J. G. Ballard, “The Ultimate City,” The Complete Short Stories, (London: Flamingo, 2001), 876. Hereafter, cited in the text as CSS.

[20] New York’s ‘Fresh Kill’ landfill site towers at 505ft tall and 2.8 by 3.8 miles diameter; twenty-five times the size of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. Ballard’s pyramids of waste are therefore closer to reality than they at first appear. For more on Fresh Kill see William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (1992; Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001), 3-9.

[21] For an overview of the many different varieties of Dadaism, see Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Octopus, 1980), 7-52.

[22] Marcel Duchamp, quoted in William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 37.

[23] See Scanlan, On Garbage, 89-115. Although Scanlan ignores the excess of meaning Duchamp’s aesthetics of waste inspires, he nevertheless is right in noting that the use of rubbish by Duchamp is fundamental to an art that “has no objective meaning” 96.

[24] Dylan Trigg has written that an encounter with decaying modern buildings prompts an experience of the “post-industrial sublime,” proving “reason to be fictitious.” See The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason, New Studies in Aesthetics 37 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 141-153.

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 of Troy Paiva, photographer and ‘big-city spelunker’, was brought to my attention recently. This is most definitely Ballardian, in the dictionary sense, even though Troy tells me he only read Ballard recently. These irradiated visions of a crumbling, post-industrial America — decommissioned military bases; aircraft ‘boneyards’ — are all shot at night, using available light (sodium lighting, for example, plentiful in the urban archaeological ruins Troy uncovers), or the unearthly effects of red, green and blue gelled strobe flashes. The work is presented straight out of the camera, untouched by heavy Photoshopping or other post-processing techniques.

I’m hoping to soon find out some more from Troy about his work, and I’ll post the results here.

Dominika Oramus. Grave New World: The Decline Of The West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard. University of Warsaw Press, 2007.

review by Rick McGrath

Dr Roger Luckhurst somewhat shocked the gathering of academics at last May’ first international conference on JG Ballard when he suggested all types of literary and cultural theories would find a productive home in Ballard’ open-ended fiction.

It may be somewhat ironic that Luckhurst then pulled out Grave New World and waved it at his audience, because Dominika Oramus’ new book on Ballard is based on the cultural theory that the West is in precipitous decline; her basic tenet in Grave New World 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 that we’re quickly approaching that gate where Hope is the toll is available in the fiction of J.G. Ballard.

According to Oramus, it all started in 1932: Aldus Huxley published Brave New World, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of The West, and Arnold Toynbee began work on A Study of History. It was not until 1949, however, that Oramus’ theoretical bedrock would be laid in an essay Toynbee wrote called ‘The International Outlook’, in which he noted: ‘The self-inflicted wounds from which civilizations die are not those of a material order. In the past, at any rate, it has been the spiritual wounds which have proved incurable”. No, that’s not religious. In Toynbee’s vernacular, “spiritual” means “internal”.

There you go. For Oramus, “In both his fiction and non-fiction J.G. Ballard describes the dire spiritual changes that have been taking place since the war and have transformed the West”. That’s what this book is about.

It’s All In The ‘Scapes.

One of the most intelligent aspects about Grave New World is the way Oramus organizes her approach. The book starts with a lengthy Introduction in which she lays out her theme, pays polite homage to all the main Ballard critics, from Merrill to Gasiorek, and then offers up a fascinating account of how JGB has publicly remythologized himself over the years, finally emerging as an “orientalist” after the success of Empire of The Sun, novel and movie. Oramus successfully identifies the two main problems prior Ballard critics have faced: his “classification” as a writer, and his proclivity to continuously create and recreate his own public image. The former she dismisses by treating “all of his oeuvre synchronically, as descriptions of different vistas”, and the latter she negates by carefully explaining and then ignoring Ballard’s autobiographical fantasies, trusting the tale and not the teller in the main body of her book.

However, the 11 pages Oramus devotes to Ballard’s self-fiction are some of the most compelling in the book: “The impressions and descriptions of the contemporary world and post-modernist culture mingle with personal memories and ciphered allusions to his books. The devoted reader of Ballard is now faced with a maze of cross-referential allusions and remarks, which together form his imaginary autobiography”. Most of which has been dutifully collected and published by RE/Search Publications.

The next chapter, ‘Grave New World’, is equally interesting, although perhaps mistitled, as the content is a close study of Ballard’s intellectual themes and his theoretical sources. Oramus carefully begins with Huxley, and then moves to a discussion of historians Toynbee, Spengler and Gibbon and their theoretical influence on the young Ballard. Equally influential are concerns of the mind, and Oramus next examines the ideas of Freud, Jung, Laing and the Surrealists, and shows how they, Freud foremost, are essential to understanding Ballard’s fiction. She then moves to mass culture, and examines the ideas of McLuhan, Debord and Baudrillard before finishing the chapter with the weakest links: Toffler, Fukuyama and Huntington in their roles as dire warning futurists. Personally, I’ve never seen much of this trio’s influence in any Ballard, but Oramus probably included them because of their necessary role in her overall thesis of the spiritual (internal) death of the West.

The next five chapters are devoted to Ballardian themes: ‘Battlefields’, a study of war; ‘Cityscapes’, the urban landscape; ‘Mediascapes’, the mass media; ‘Mindscapes’, the inner world; and ‘Wastelands’, the entropic end.

Each of these important themes is intelligently discussed, with conclusions based on close readings of the major novels and short stories. ‘Battlefields’, for example, offers a look at war and violence as “one of the most important motifs in J.G. Ballard’s oeuvre, and surrender to aggression and the death drive are basic characteristics of his vision of contemporary culture.” Oramus treats us to revelatory readings of Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and The Atrocity Exhibition, ultimately linking war, violence and a human mind conditioned to self-destruction with Freud and the A-bomb as a turning point in history with Spengler, to bring it all back to her thesis of decline.

And so it goes through each chapter: a Ballardian landscape is analyzed through its fictional usage in various works, Ballardian sources are applied, conclusions are drawn; the point is made. Sometimes Oramus amuses us with an unusual reading of a Ballard classic, the most daring being her reading of Concrete Island as an hallucination by the protagonist, Maitland, during the seconds that elapsed between the accident and him dying behind the wheel.

On the other hand, in her reading of a lesser work, Day of Creation for example, while astutely recognizing the blend of media and memory Mallory uses to create his tale, she seems to miss the point of it being yet another variation in “creative” autobiography -– a story about writing a story — and veers towards the more sinister reading of the tale being a sign of the power of the media, and how visual culture ensnares its victims.

But this, of course, is the downside of Grave New World — it exists to prove an “external” point, and really, what could be easier than choosing Ballard to substantiate the Ballardian belief that our civilization is slipping into a psychopathological dystopia?

The problem is, a very great part of Ballard’s fiction is not pessimistic, but individually optimistic. Nor are his characters apparently even slightly concerned about changing what’s going on around them — all objects tend to be ciphers, anyway — and they tend to deal with their situations in highly imaginative (“spiritual”) ways that offer personal, not social, psychological relief. There’s also Ballard’s use of humour, which Oramus completely disregards. If we’re all in that Pontiac and Ballard’s driving, there’s a comedy CD playing intermittently on the stereo.

One other aspect of this book I found exasperating is the lack of novels and short stories in the Index. What? Yes… you can’t look up all the times, say, Crash is mentioned. There’s an index or listing for damn near everything else, but nothing for any of the books (Ballard & otherwise) Oramus mentions. Hopefully another edition will solve this serious oversight.

Grave New World is a sort of one-trick pony with ornate dressage. The whole decline of the West thing, although interesting and surely an idea with merit, does begin to pale after awhile, and Oramus almost seems to gloat slightly as she lovingly describes our culture’s long list of woes. It’s almost like complaining about teenagers. However, when she gets into the novels and stories her inner literary critic takes over, and she delivers up many satisfactory readings, links, insights and ideas about most of Ballard’s oeuvre, including, I might add, The Wind From Nowhere, in which we agree many of Ballard’s later stylistic ideas were developed.

What I personally appreciated most about Grave New World is Oramus’ work to establish Freud as perhaps Ballard’s greatest intellectual influence. Her outline of Freud’s Ballard-appropriate theories is clear and succinct, and should help any non-Freudian reader expand their appreciation of all Ballard’s work.

As well, her knowledge of Ballard’s “imaginary” self is extensive and illuminating. Perhaps no other modern writer has created such an extensive mock biography, which he no doubt created to hide behind — a concept Oramus chose not to follow in this work.

At the end of our civilization, I’d rate this as a bifurcated book. The thesis is basically subjective — are we really on the way out? — but the analysis is highly objective, relying basically on the source material. It’s well written, understandable, acknowledges the critical field, and develops a number of Ballardian themes in a way no other critic has attempted. Well worth reading, even if the end is nigh.

Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard has been produced in a limited quantity. If you’re interested in obtaining a copy, please contact Dominika Oramus at the University of Warsaw.

..:: MORE RICK McGRATH
+ Terminal Collection: Rick McGrath’s JGB site
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on JG Ballard’s Cover Art
+ It’s An Ad, Ad, Ad World: Rick McGrath’s review of Kingdom Come

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 19 and 22, 2008, TRIP brings together artists, academics, movers, shakers, do-ers and dissenters in a unique event combining an interdisciplinary conference with a city-wide series of actions, exhibitions, and screenings. TRIP enables the previously separate worlds of theory and practice to interact, initiating new approaches and energies, and furthering techniques to take on and alter the physical environment.

* * Beginning as a reaction to the industrial revolution, the re-imagining of the city by romantics, bohemians, and avant-gardists evolved into a diverse range of strategies, practices and arguments, from the psychogeographic drift or derive to the artistic intervention. By the 1990s these were being utilised by artists, writers, activists, and historians, attempting to negotiate urban and rural space in the post-modern world. But practices developed in the twentieth century encounter a different world in the twenty first – a more observed and policed world on the one hand, a more corporate, globally-connected world on the other. Increasingly the body, social, individual and political, is the site of contradictory demands – the demands to consume versus the demands of control.

* * TRIP will be based at Manchester Metropolitan University, on the city’s main southerly corridor, Oxford Road. But we want events to take place throughout Manchester, in as wide a variety of spaces and venues as possible. Like many northern cities, Manchester is changing fast. Perhaps you want to critique the implications of “regeneration”, or perhaps you want to stimulate new ways of engaging with an increasingly consumerised environment. Maybe you’re passionate about the possibilities of inventive walking and drifting, or maybe you’re a performance artist aiming to change the energy of a public space. Wherever you’re coming from, TRIP wants to hear from you with your ideas.

* To submit a paper, you should send an abstract outlining your subject and the key points of your presentation.

* To submit an idea for an intervention, performance or a walk involving members of the public, please outline in one paragraph the aims and ideal locations for your project.

* To submit an idea for a gallery-based project, please outline in one paragraph the thinking behind your installation or work..

Please try to keep your paragraphs to a maximum of 200 words. And don’t forget your contact details.

Deadline for submissions: October 1st 2007.

Submissions should be emailed to:

* And for further information on festival announcements, walks, talks and events, please access http://trip2008.wordpress.com

The festival proceedings will be fully documented and recorded, and an edited volume of essays, art and photography will be published at a later date.

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 by Michelle’s images, with their gently jarring, transmogrified quality — surreal ruptures, like little “vents of hell” (a favourite Ballard phrase), smoothly integrated into the furniture of late capitalism.

Now, if only I didn’t live 17,000km from Birmingham…

————————————————————————————————————
FUTURE RUINS
by Michelle Lord
————————————————————————————————————

“Inspired by author J.G. Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the urban environment, Future Ruins is a photographic critique of the urban planning of the 1970s and Ballard’s novels of the same period.

Ballard often described the beckoning future of the modern metropolis in terms of the utopian ideology of Brutalist concrete architecture. Brutalism was an architectural movement originally associated with social idealism that is now criticised for disregarding the communal, historic and surrounding built environment. Set against a backdrop of Birmingham’s few remaining concrete structures such as Spaghetti Junction, Central Library and New Street Station signal box, Future Ruins aims to highlight the temporality of our landscape, particularly at a time when Birmingham has embarked on a process of regeneration in order to redefine itself.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007.

Exploring the impact of the modern world upon the urban built environment and its inhabitants, Ballard’s stories evoke images of cityscapes increasingly transformed by science, technology and design. Using handmade models and rear-screen projection, scenes based upon Ballard’s apocalyptic narratives such as ‘Ultimate City’ or Concrete Island are relocated within Birmingham. Familiar architectural locations around the city take on the appearance of evacuated spaces occupied by strange, carefully arranged structures, built from the technological detritus of abandoned television sets, cars, computers and domestic appliances.

Birmingham offers an interesting working example of urban regeneration as it strives to build a new city image. Positioned between architectural decline and growth, the landscape of the city is a collage of old and new, revealing stark contrasts of industrial and post-war brutalism with groundbreaking structures like the Selfridges building.

By resituating some of Ballard’s fictions, this project hopes to reflect and provoke debate about both the architectural past and future of Birmingham, at a time when the city has embarked on a process of regeneration in order to redefine itself. With the recent destruction of the old Bull Ring, the proposed demolition of Central Library and potential redevelopment of New Street Station, the project is perhaps a timely reflection of its now lost or soon to disappear architectural history, while questioning whether the concrete legacy that remains is still a necessary part of the architectural fabric of the city.”

Michelle Lord

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007.

————————————————————————————————————
All images are for sale. Contact Michelle for details.
————————————————————————————————————

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 against the eminently bombable backdrop of the Tate Modern; excavating the strata of the late 20th century with Jo Murray amid the lush, green undergrowth that lines the scabby underbelly of the M3 motorway; wandering the terminal sands that sheath the haunted and forgotten seaside zone of Grays Beach; getting lost in the forest and coastal paths of the Isle of Wight with my two brothers, as we searched high and low in the pitch black for the dinghy we had beached that would take us back to the safety of our boat. We stumbled upon a hidden community of nocturnal fisherfolk replete with high-powered torches for eyes and a string of gadgets blinking in the dark from the tips of their enormous rods like cosmic antennae…

But I’ve been too pushed for time to write it all up, as I’ve had some pressing family matters to engage with — the English portion of the Sellars clan is not one I get to interact with much, so I’m making the most of it. I used to have no trouble writing travel blogs on the go, but this time round it seems to have eluded me. Even writing this short entry is highly pressurised, as I must awake in 5 hours 3 hours at the crack of dawn to catch a fishing boat to Sealand, where I’ll be spending a day and a night in a considerable state of isolation. On my return it’s London for a couple of days, probably visiting old Brixtonian haunts, before hopefully visiting the sound mirrors in Kent. The following weekend I’m in Dubai and then I’m pootling off home to Melbourne, where I’ll be writing this trip up in all its glory.

I’ve let intuition guide me when taking photos and have been flabbergasted to discover that there are very few shots of people. Instead, industrial wrecks and new, machine-tooled monuments have dominated, like the old, semi-submerged pier in Brighton, the M3 in Shepperton, and the new lock in Cardiff, with its markings resolving themselves in op-art style allusions.

I know what’s happening, here. I watched Children of Men for the first time on the plane over from Melbourne and was deeply shocked and disturbed by its bleak view of a sparsely populated, near-future, anarchic Britain. That unnerving film has filtered my vision steel-grey every time I’ve looked through my camera lens: I’m finding resonance everywhere I move.

(I also hope to see 28 Weeks Later before I leave — God only knows what *that* will do to me.)

But all that’s to be expanded upon in future posts. I hope you’ll stay tuned for another week or so while I gather my senses and marshall my thoughts and attempt to make sense of this journey into inner space.

Until then, ‘Chant chant love war fear hate… Out of control – mob running wild / All you ever get is all you steal / Side of London that the tourists never see / Angle ambience’ (PiL, ‘Chant’, 1979).

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 a three-kilometre, decaying industrial zone. The film is divided into three sections: The Present, set in 2013; The Future (2085); and The Post-Future (3079).

“The Present”: Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

In “The Present”, a series of tableaux unfold: factories, blank business parks, decrepit office buildings, brutalist petrol stations. They look like still shots, but close examination reveals subtle motion: clouds inch along; a bird flaps in the distance. There are no people. The shots are looped; almost imperceptibly, the clouds return to their original position. Is this a deliberate aesthetic? Or a a necessary suturing to prevent the intrusion of offscreen elements irrelevant to the plot? In any case, it’s very effective: nothing happens. Everything remains the same, trapped in an eternal loop. The sound design begins with processed field recordings: birds, insects, magnified to unbearable levels. It settles down and melancholic piano chords pick their way through.

Madeline Hodge in Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy). Photo by Pancho Calladetti.

In “The Future”, the same shots appear, except this time the factories and buildings are pockmarked and scarred, and everything is infested with a queasy, irradiated digital-pink glow. Glowing red clouds gather overhead, and suburban zombies begin to appear: young people, spectral — they are see-through at the edges — repeating bizarre facial and physical tics.

Left: Nat Bates in Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

One poor soul scratches his ear over and over again; another (played by Nat Bates, director of the Liquid Architecture sound-art festival) looks to the ground and back up over and over, mimicking the film loops in the first part of the film. The sound in this section is brilliant, with Samartzis generating extremely unnerving electrical effects — like dying power stations — and violent feedback via what appears to be hyper-magnified recordings of fire. Brophy, meanwhile, triggers some kind of funky synth-bass line, obviously unable to escape his iconic 80s past.

In the “Post-Future”, nothing remains of the buildings, or the zombies, really, except their shapeshifting ghosts, which float around a blasted landscape, totally devoid of life. The sound design amps up a notch. Yep, you guessed it: it’s positively unearthly. Who knows what these guys have done here? Fed cicadas through a cheese grater and processed it in a digital blender, for all I know. It’s freaky stuff. And that colour palette: it’s the colour of rotting pork or severed heads. Or something.

“The Post-Future”: Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

Northern Void is a savage vision and continues Brophy’s aim — started in his feature film, Body Melt — of completely irradiating Australia’s suburban “non-places” and seeing what bizarre life forms sprout in the aftermath. An extrapolation, of course, of what he perceives as a process that’s already in place in a late-capitalist society, specifically Plenty Rd, where, he writes, “cracked 60s brickwork, shrivelled 70s council shrubbery, peeling 80s computer-typeset signage, 90s Day-Glo painted lettering on darkened windows [represent] the corpus of business: dying slowly while tethered to an indifferent life-support system.”

At first glance, Brophy’s vision seems similar to J.G. Ballard’s: the latter is also concerned with laying waste to the suburbs in different and imaginative ways. Both are concerned with a type of posthumanism. But Ballard sees the total breakdown of society as a chance for people to “embrace the catastrophes for their own psychological needs” (quoted in The Sunday Times, 1990) — to reinvent themselves free of the restraints of technological society and its “toxic imagery”.

Brophy’s world is far bleaker. There is no reinvention, no way out. For Brophy, late capitalism is the end of history. Entropy and the serpent’s tail of consumerism wins. It’s too late to do anything about it except go down clicking your fingers to a funky bass line.

Still, I wouldn’t call the film wholly successful. Fifty minutes seems far too long for a plotless conceit such as this, as visually stunning and as sonically challenging as it is. Northern Void outlines an exasperating 22 scenarios that develop over the three stages of the film (although I’m aware there are valid points to be made about repetition and boredom and so on). Half that, or even less, and I don’t reckon I’d be fidgeting in my seat, as I was.

I’d be exhilarated, in fact (although that would be more a Ballardian conceit than a Brophyism).

Note: Northern Void is now moving onto screenings/performances in London and Moscow.

Nigel Brown in Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy). Photo by Pancho Calladetti.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Philip Brophy home page
+ Philip Samartzis home page
+ Brophy’s overview of the project
+ Brophy on the genesis of Northern Void
+ Brophy interview with Nat Bates on Sleepy Brain

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 – where they turned against each other in their desperate struggle to survive …”

The Wind From Nowhere (1961) is JG Ballard’s first novel, not that you’d know it from official JGB bibliographies, where it’s never mentioned, or in interviews, where Ballard continues to assert that The Drowned World was his first book.

The wind from nowhere has gone back to nowhere.

In a 1975 interview with David Pringle, Ballard says: “I don’t see my fiction as being disaster-oriented, certainly not most of my SF – apart from The Wind from Nowhere which is just a piece of hackwork. The others, which are reasonably serious, are not disaster stories.”

The book does contain some ‘empty symbolism’, and the characters sometimes articulate overlong expositions, all a bit jarring from an author who was to bloom into the master of sparse, laser-sharp, all-killer-no-filler writing.

Still, it *is* Ballard; all the classic archetypes are in place, if a little sketchily (except for the ‘Vaughan’ figure) — the bitch-as-catalyst, especially — and it does have what must be the first truly classic JGB quote, one that ranks with the pearls collected in Vale’s RE/Search book, a quote that both presages future events and qualifies current ones.

A JGB ‘soundbite’ as Mr Pringle calls them… On p112 of my Penguin edition, Ballard writes: “Remember, it’s not enough to make history ­– you’ve got to arrange for someone to record it for you.”

Here’s an excerpt from an article by Ben Jeapes, one of the very few essays on the web regarding this ‘idiot offspring’ of JGB’s:

The seeds of what have since become traditional Ballard themes are all there, of course. Civilisation collapses, a handful of weirdos … no, not weirdos. These are real, everyday people. They either try and do something about keeping society going or they lie low and wait for it to go away — both sensible, believable actions.”

Here’s another review excerpt, from Strange Words:

That undefinable atmosphere that marks Ballard’s best work is here, around the edges, pushing away at our perceptions. While not partaking of the extreme ideas of The Crystal World, the obsession of The Day of Creation, or the fatal ennui of The Drowned World, there is that strange taste at the back of the mouth that is Ballard.
…
You don’t need a weatherman to know that a Ballard wind is blowing. In some ways, a lesser Ballard effort. But one can almost sense Ballard ringing out the old, making way for the strange and terrible world he would soon construct.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ The Wind from Nowhere is now a wind from somewhere
+ ‘Enigmatic Engineering’ in The Wind from Nowhere
+ ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland…’

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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 which an expedition travels to record the flora and fauna of this new Triassic Age. This early novel by the author of CRASH and EMPIRE OF THE SUN is at once a fast paced narrative, a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a speculative foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.”

On the back of my 1974 Penguin edition, there’s no blurb, simply this:

Ballard is one of the brightest new stars in post-war fiction. This tale of strange and terrible adventures in a world of steaming jungles has an oppressive power reminiscent of Conrad (Kingsley Amis).”

The Drowned World’s relevance endures, as Umberto Rossi demonstrates with his comparison of urban landscapes in Drowned and Hello America:

J.G. Ballard has dealt at least twice with the apocalyptic image of the Dead City. This somewhat disturbing landscape is the background of his novels The Drowned World and Hello America. The two mark different points on the axis of time—namely, 1962 and 1979, respectively—cutting a segment on the line of Ballard’s evolution as a writer, but also defining a period of literary history during which many significant events took place, both inside and outside SF. Between 1962 and 1979 Ballard wrote important works such as The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and The Crystal World; SF literature “came of age” thanks to P.K. Dick, K.W. Jeter, Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, and Brian Aldiss; and, as for North American literature, the postmodernist wave reached its zenith.”

On the other side of the coin, Justina Robinson takes Ballard to task for those old bugbears: characters as cyphers, and stylisation over emotion…

…stylisation continues throughout all the personal action in the book; a kind of old code, which to my modern eyes seems almost quaintly peculiar… A final criticism would be that the characters are all too much like ciphers acting out symbolic roles, and not sufficiently humanised to ring entirely true. Their remove from the reader and from each other, finally makes the entire story seem as though it’s been viewed through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.”

Although she does end with this:

As a whole…this book deserves its place on the masterworks’ shelf and in the history of SF and literature. It shows, even from thirty-seven years ago, that artistic and literary aspirations could be brought together with SF ideas in a seamless whole…it’s worth reading for the sheer pleasure that the scenes of opulence and decay can provide, and in the wonder of the drowned world images that Ballard was able to completely master.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ BBC Radio 7 adapts Drowned World
+ Flooded London
+ Munich Round-Up: An Interview with JG Ballard
+ Jon Cattapan’s Drowned World

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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 in the water below his feet.”

Ballard’s third novel was originally published in the US in 1964 as The Burning World, but is now more commonly known as The Drought, the name it was given for its initial UK publication in 1965. Strange Words has an intriguing summation of the book’s themes:

The Burning World is the tale of the long season. More specifically, it is a story of the timeless moment between the seasons, between end and the beginning of the cycle. It is the season of Shiva, whose eye opens and destroys the world in fire. And then it all begins again …

The Ballardian chronomania of The Burning World is the end of time. People rush like lemmings to a sea that can supply them no succor, and have their individuality destroyed in an endless string of small, desperate communities which are riven by blood feuds over the stuff of survival. They trap what small bits of the tidal flux that they can, to distill water and catch whatever meager food swims with it. Ransom, the ambiguous protagonist, sees the beach people as dehumanized things, as if cloned by a “cancerous division of time”, in a purgatory of beach limbo, desperate shantytowns where people are waiting around to die.”

The blurb on my 1968 Penguin edition is typeset like a poem and features the immortal line ‘Idiots reign’. Someone was taking themselves a bit too seriously, here…

Rain is a thing of the
past. Radio-active
waste has stopped the
sea evaporating.

The sun beats down on
the parching earth, and on the parching
spirit of man. A warped new humankind
is bred out of the dead land – bitter,
murderous, its values turned upside down.

Idiots reign. Water
replaces currency and becomes the source
of a bleak new evil…

If it ever happened,
it could be very like this.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ The Drought: Water Vigilantes
+ Munich Round-Up: Interview with J.G. Ballard

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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 ascent of the high-rise, this is a brilliantly original work that has affected anarchists, surrealists and psychologists alike.

The quotes on the back of my 1993 Flamingo edition tell the story:

J.G. Ballard wants to argue that high-rise flats incite maniacal aggression and perversion in ordinary people. High-Rise is about a 40-storey apartment block, and how from innocent beginnings it reduces people to murder, incest and above all a passionate love for chaos … a gripping read, particularly if you like your thrills chilly, bloody and with claims to social relevance.”

Time Out

“Harsh and ingenious … High-Rise is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind.”

Martin Amis, New Statesman

A modern fable — a commentary on the hideous possibilities of advanced technology and the rat-like nature of trapped human beings. The writing s cool, the observation exact, the idea bold and well-developed; everything seems to demand attention and analysis”.

Financial Times

Rick McGrath has onlined an in-depth dissection of the novel:

A night patrol creeps along a dark hallway past a barricade of desks; a flash of white birds leap into the air like a fluttering flag of surrender; a dog lies drowned in the middle of a community pool… welcome to High-Rise, J.G. Ballard’s deeply subversive study of a society in transformation.

J.G. Ballard has often told interviewers that his characters all seek a kind of highly personal psychic salvation, and that they will, if necessary, create their own self-defining mythologies and pursue them to their furthest logical ends, no matter how illogical it seems, or what the cost. In High-Rise, Ballard has created an isolated environment for the close study of the deconstruction of an ultra-modern apartment block into a new, devolved society based on the premise that you are what your cave is. Readers looking for obsessive, outlandish social mayhem will not be disappointed: High-Rise has 40 stories of shock corridor ahead.

The premise is fascinating: just after the last property in a 1,000-suite high-rise is occupied, the first little signs of social change begin to become public. A party is in progress. A wine bottle crashes and smashes all over a resident’s balcony. Soon crazed, drunken, mob-mentality parties are breaking out all over the building, and now we’re deeply into the action, led in shocked wonder as Ballard brilliantly describes the metamorphosis of group psychopathological desire into a new kind of urban social model.”

Rick McGrath. ‘Deconstructing High-Rise’.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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, published over the last thirty years. In a long and highly-acclaimed career, J.G. Ballard has established himself as one of Britian’s most distinctive and admired writers, the author of such influential novels as Crash, The Drowned World, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun and, most recently, Rushing to Paradise. Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the finest of these pieces and grouped them under themes such as film, lives, the visual world, writers, science, autobiography and science fiction.

Marlon Brando, Nancy Reagan, Elvis Presley, Deng Xiaoping, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, William Burroughs and Graham Greene are just some of the people who feature in the ninety articles, together with many of the themes familiar to readers of Ballard’s fiction, includign Shanghai, television, surrealism, cars, motorways and the atom bomb.

The result is an astonishingly varied and fascinating collection — a provocative and entertaining review of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of one of this country’s most original writers.”

I happen to think that some of Ballard’s best writing can be found in the non-fiction realm; in fact, there was a time, when I first chanced upon his work, that I was convinced he was a superior journalist than a novelist. Although it’s not in this collection, I especially savour Ballard’s phrasing in his lovely meditation on Helmut Newton:

A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

The Edge features a typically acerbic review of User’s Guide, by Gerald Houghton:

In 1977 Ballard wrote one of his most experimental and most brilliant short stories, ‘The Index’. Did the attached book ever actually exist? Was it all a figment of some deranged imagination? All that remains of this autobiography is a collection of names and page numbers; tantalising nudges and winks, like a road-map with the motorways rubbed out. It’s a game we can play with A User’s Guide To The Millenium: Hitler nuzzles up to Mae West, Dali to Nancy Reagan, Derek Jarman with Walt Disney, Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Jim interred in the Japanese camp. What, if anything, do all these and the rest have to do with this rather unpresupposing British author?

Ballard is never less than urbane, but his best dinner party manners mask real teeth. Thus he adores the Surrealists, Henry Miller, Joyce and Genet, but is dismissive towards others (Warhol), occasionally outright scathing (Nancy Reagan). The Ballard in these pages is clearly in awe of Burroughs’ reupholstering of narrative form, while describing himself as an old-fashioned storyteller. (It’s fulsome praise that should be tempered with a reading of his superb interview with Will Self in Self’s recent Junk Mail.) He is mystifyingly rhapsodic over Dali, surely the most overrated artist of the century. (What, one wonders, would Ballard make of the comment that Dali is the ‘kind of artist you think is brilliant when you’re 15′? Are you listening Damien Hirst?).”

..:: CONTENTS

1. FILM
Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet…

• ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’ (1990)
• ‘Magical Days at Rick’s’ (1993)
• ‘Hollywood Sex Idols’ (1991)
• ‘Push-button Death’ (1991)
• ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977)
• ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ (1987)
• ‘Courting the Cobra’ (1993)
• ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991)
• ‘La Jetee’ (1996)
• ‘Blue Velvet’ (1993)

2. LIVES
Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito…

• ‘The Chain-saw Biographer’ (1991)
• ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992)
• ‘Fallen Idol’ (1991)
• ‘The Killing Time’ (1979)
• ‘Mob Psychology’ (1991)
• ‘Closed Doors’ (1977)
• ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989)
• ‘Sinister Spider’ (1992)
• ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993)

More contents to come.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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 random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London’s fringe protest movements, falling in with a shadowy group based in the comfortable Thames-side estate of Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, the group aims to rouse the docile middle classes to anger and violence, to freem them from both the self-imposed burdens of civic responsibility and the trappings of a consumer society — private schools, foreign nannies, health insurance and overpriced housing. Markham, seeking the truth behind Laura’s death, is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control. Every certainty in his life is questioned as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital…

Compelling, disturbing and typically acute, Millennium People is J.G. Ballard’s most remarkable novel yet. Its shockingly plausible vision of a society in collapse is proof that this most original and influential of authors is at the peak of his powers.”

Millennium People is witty, life-affirming, sharp as a blade — and highly topical, continuing to resonate into the 21st century. K-punk captured the tenor precisely:

Gould is an elegant and eloquent salesman of the Deleuze-Guattari ‘line of abolition’, the Fascist drive to destruction which is ultimately a drive towards self-destruction. Ballard, who, to his credit has always refused to endorse facile moralizing, would no doubt object to that characterization, since to in any way condemn or censure Gould would be to confirm the very securocratic values he seeks to undermine.

However, the most compelling aspect of Millennium People, politically speaking, is not the in many ways familiar asignifying violence, but its PUNK THEORY OF CLASS REVOLT.”

k-punk. ‘What are the politics of boredom?’

This is hard-core. From now on ordering an olive ciabatta is a political act.”

J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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 one volume; reprinted in two volumes in 2006):

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes — regarded by many as Britain’s No.1 living fiction writer.

J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists. Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories — including four that have not previously appeared in a collection — have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity tp review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers”.

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilirating imagination — and a national treasure.”

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

A large body of opinion says that Ballard’s a better short-form stylist than novelist. On some days, I agree. My first exposure to Ballard, aside from Crash, was his short story ‘The Subliminal Man’. It hung in my imagination like a sharp blade over a heifer’s neck. Absolutely incredible, the imagery of it:

The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
…
Then the flicker of lights cleared and steadied, blazing out continuously, and together the crowd looked up at the decks of brilliant letters. The phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
…
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).

All the criticisms that are usually applied to Ballard’s novels — style over substance; lack of characterisation; thin plot — simply don’t apply in this format. In fact, in this realm they become virtues, as the sheer weight of Ballard’s imagination is compressed, and then unpacked, with full force. He didn’t dub the short pieces that make up The Atrocity Exhibition ‘condensed novels’ for nothing. Ballard’s a radical, a man who saw that the 20th-century novel was stifled by 19th-century function and set about stripping it to its very essence. That aesthetic became his body of short stories: quite simply, the man’s a master of the form and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t write them anymore.

I have the hardback, single-volume, supposedly complete version — a fallacy, for it only includes three pieces from The Atrocity Exhibition. I’m not sure if the new two-volume set rectifies that — probably not, considering it would take away sales from Atrocity itself.

It’s a bit of a cheat. If the publisher considers Atrocity to be a novel (as Ballard does), rather than a collection of short stories, then the Complete Short Stories shouldn’t contain any Atrocity pieces at all. According to Ballard expert David Pringle, there are three Ballard shorts that weren’t included, seemingly at the expense of the three Atrocities: ‘Journey Across a Crater’ (1970), ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B——” (1984) and ‘The Dying Fall’ (1994).

I call that a missed opportunity.

Update: reader Mike Holliday contacted me with some further comments on this collection:

Despite its title, the book does not include all of Ballard’s short stories. If we discount those that are shortened versions of Ballard’s novels (Storm-Wind, The Drowned World, Equinox), then the following are missing:

(i) The Violet Noon, an early non-professional story published while Ballard was at university

(ii) most of the stories included in the original edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, namely You and Me and the Continuum, The Assassination Weapon, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, The Atrocity Exhibition, Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy, The Death Module, Love and Napalm: Export USA, The Great American Nude, The University of Death, The Generations of America, The Summer Cannibals, Tolerances of the Human Face, Crash!

(iii) the so-called ‘surgical fictions’, Coitus 80, Princess Margaret’s Facelift, Mae West’s Reduction Mamoplasty, Queen Elizabeth’s
Rhinoplasty, Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty

(iv) a few other pieces, namely Journey Across a Crater, The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******, Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon, and The Dying Fall. It also excludes those items classified as Miscellaneous Media [including Ballard's collages for Ambit magazine].

In 2006, The Complete Short Stories was republished in two paperback volumes, but this edition omits the novella The Ultimate City.”

Disappointingly, there’s not a lot of decent criticism surrounding Ballard’s short-form work. Over at Rick McGrath’s site, however, John Boston has posted a thorough and interesting account of “the four short stories that got [Ballard] back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (1959), The Waiting Grounds (1959), The Sound-Sweep (1960), and Zone of Terror (1960).”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard’s Introduction to the Complete Short Stories

..:: CONTENTS

+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘Escapement’ (1956)
+ ‘The Concentration City’ (1957)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957)
+ ‘Manhole 69′ (1957)
+ ‘Track 12′ (1958)
+ ‘The Waiting Grounds’ (1959)
+ ‘Now: Zero’ (1959)
+ ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
+ ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960)
+ ‘Chronopolis’ (1960)
+ ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960)
+ ‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ (1960)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘Deep End’ (1961)
+ ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961)
+ ‘Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
+ ‘Billennium’ (1961)
+ ‘The Gentle Assassin’ (1961)
+ ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962)
+ ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
+ ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1962)
+ ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
+ ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962)
+ ‘The Subliminal Man’ 63 (1962)
+ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1962)
+ ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962)
+ ‘The Time-Tombs’ (1962)
+ ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1962)
+ ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1962)
+ ‘End-Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Minus One’ (1962)
+ ‘The Sudden Afternoon’ (1962)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Time of Passage’ (1964)
+ ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ (1964)
+ ‘The Lost Leonardo’ (1964)
+ ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
+ ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)
+ ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964)
+ ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964)
+ ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964)
+ ‘The Volcano Dances’ (1964)
+ ‘The Beach Murders’ (1966)
+ ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966)
+ ‘The Impossible Man’ (1966)
+ ‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ (1966)
+ ‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ (1966)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘The Recognition’ (1967)
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)
+ ‘The Comsat Angels’ (1968)
+ ‘The Killing Ground’ (1969)
+ ‘A Place and a Time to Die’ (1969)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ (1972)
+ ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)
+ ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975)
+ ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
+ ‘The Life and Death of God’ (1976)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976)
+ ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)
+ ‘The Smile’ (1976)
+ ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)
+ ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)
+ ‘The Index’ (1977)
+ ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977)
+ ‘Theatre of War’ (1977)
+ ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ (1978)
+ ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)
+ ‘Zodiac 2000′ (1978)
+ ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978)
+ ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’ (1980)
+ ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)
+ ‘Report on An Unidentified Space Station’ (1982)
+ ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984)
+ ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985)
+ ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ (1985)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War 3′ (1988)
+ ‘Love in a Colder Climate’ (1989)
+ ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
+ ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)
+ ‘War Fever’ (1989)
+ ‘Dream Cargoes’ (1990)
+ ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992)
+ ‘The Message from Mars’ (1992)
+ ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ (1992)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

“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 allure of Hollywood; and Viggo Mortensen’s publishing imprint, Perceval Press.”

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 memorably, City of Quartz describes the militarization of public space in LA, from the impenetrable “panic rooms” of Beverly Hills mansions to the shifting ganglands of South Central. Not only does the Los Angeles Police Department use “a geo-synchronous law enforcement satellite” in their literal oversight of the city, but “thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid.” In Los Angeles today, “carceral structures have become the new frontier of public architecture.”

Many of Davis’s conclusions will annoy you – but that’s half the point of reading his books’.

Read the full interview, which contains a defence of Ridley Scott’s film Black Hawk Down. Although I haven’t seen it, I lost interest in Ridley after Legend and Black Rain, after thinking he was a godhead with the double KO of Alien and Blade Runner…

Gladiator didn’t help matters, either.

By the way, here’s JGB’s review of Davis’s Dead Cities.

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 chances of finding prized glass fishing floats. But for the environment, it’s bad news, marine scientists say.

The periodic arrival of the debris-laden gyre — a giant, circular oceanic surface current — poses the threat of entanglement for seals, turtles and seabirds. There is the potential of damage to reefs as huge snags of netting catch coral heads and break them in the surf. And there’s the ghost-net problem: lost fishing nets that continue catching and killing fish until the nets are torn to bits or removed from the sea.

Debris drifts regularly with the circulating currents of the North Pacific, but much of it builds up in a quiet region of the ocean associated with a persistent high-pressure zone. When that zone moves south, the debris can get swept out to Hawai’i's shores.

“It’s normally between 30 and 40 (degrees latitude) north and 130 to 155 (degrees longitude) west,” said Charles Moore, founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and captain of the research vessel Alguita.

The Alguita has made repeated research trips into the North Pacific Gyre, which Moore calls “the Garbage Patch.”

The debris field has garnered increasing attention because of its threat to marine life. In March and April 2005, an NOAA aircraft spent three days flying over it with specialized electronic imaging gear provided by Airborne Technologies. More than 2,000 pieces of debris were found, along with more than 100 nets — one of them the length of three football fields, said NOAA Fisheries marine debris specialist Jake Asher, who flew on the mission.

Scientists also have placed tracking devices on drifting nets and found that most appear to drift round and round, until high winds drive them out of the gyre or they run into an island.

And the stuff visible on the surface isn’t everything. State Department of Land and Natural Resources naturalist Cynthia Vanderlip, who sailed to the Garbage Patch aboard the Alguita, said that divers have found that the entire water column is filled with debris.

“As the plastic debris fouls with algae, it begins to sink. When you dive down and look up, you see these beams of light and the little bits of plastic look like stars, like looking up into the night sky,” Vanderlip said.

Vanderlip has a particular interest in debris, since she watches thousands of pounds of it wash ashore each summer as she works at Kure Atoll, the state wildlife refuge at the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago. Last year, she said, three Hawaiian monk seals became entangled in debris at Kure. She released one that was caught in gill net webbing.

Three blackfooted albatrosses also became entangled in debris on the island, she said.

Moore said that, ultimately, it may be the tiniest pieces of debris that have the biggest effect.

“The amount of plastic in the ocean is going up at a geometric rate. As you sail along, you see a chip, a chip, another chip, a plastic bag, neon tubes, fishing buoys, toothbrushes, hagfish traps, more chips. The pieces break down into smaller pieces, but they don’t go away,” Moore said. “The most insidious stuff is the stuff that’s the same size as the plankton. Fish are eating it.

“There is no such thing as org