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

JG BALLARD, 1930–2009

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009. pp. 5, 6-11. Reproduced with permission.

James Graham Ballard was one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. His writing encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis, technological fetishism, urban ruination and suburban mob culture, and he pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without equal.

Ballard’s understanding of architecture and architects, and his prophetic visions, made him one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns.

From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. At a time when architectural discourse has become wholly subsumed by the moneymaking pre-occupations of the architectural profession, the writings of JG Ballard serve as reminder that architecture is about people, the things that they do and the places where they do them. Sometimes architecture will involve terrible people doing terrible things in terrible places, but the enduring nature of the human species is that we will always carry on; there is, after all, always the future.

Nic Clear, 2009.

Introduction: ‘A NEAR FUTURE’, by Nic Clear.

Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991, p 5.[1]

Later, as he sat on the 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.

JG Ballard, High-Rise, 1975, p 7.[2]

Architectural design is always about the future; when architects make a proposition they always assume that it takes place in some imagined future. Architects nearly always assume that this future will be ‘better’ than the present, often as a consequence of what is being proposed. Architecture is, by its very nature, utopian.

Contemporary architecture, unlike earlier models of ‘utopian’ architecture, or perhaps because of the stigma attached to those models, has resisted an explicitly social and political agenda. Instead it has become driven by ‘ideal’ formalist agendas facilitated by the ‘shape-making’ potential of new computer-based design tools and funded by speculative finance.

Indeed, the most important transformations that have occurred in architecture over the last 30 years have not been in the shifts in fashion marking out new typologies, new forms of representation, new materials or new forms of manufacture; the biggest single shift has been in the new economic relations within the building industry and the new forms of contractual relationships that this has brought about. The rise of fast-track construction in the 1980s heralded a major change in the motivations for construction and brought about a homogenisation of building output largely predicated on maximising the economic value of the project, often with little regard for its social value.

And with the introduction of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) the current UK government has turned even health-care and educational building programmes into a speculative enterprise. PFI has always been presented as a cost-effective way of financing large infrastructural projects; however, like the government’s recent bail out of the banks, it works on the principle of the public financing the risk while the private sector skims off the profit.[3]

For a number of years the single model that has shaped the type of future that the architectural profession has based its assumptions on is one of unfettered consumer expansion. The majority of recent architectural debates have not tried to call into question the economic imperatives of late capitalism that drive financial speculation and generate the context within which private development is presented as the only option. Even the avant-garde architectural firms of the 1980s are now operating as large international commercial practices, and the Deconstructivists have proved to be more than enthusiastic capitalists. The critical and intellectual ambitions inspired by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Guy Debord have been replaced with the monetarist ideologies of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan.

The architectural profession has embraced the late capitalist model enthusiastically and uncritically, while all the time pandering to the concepts of social and environmental responsibility. The fact is that this model has been funded through speculative investment, and now that the money has run out the profession is bereft of alternatives.

The promise of an ‘urban renaissance’ has left buildings empty and negative equity is becoming once again the dominant economic value across the property world.

The architectural world has proved completely incapable of suggesting what the future may hold; can one still believe in the shiny renders of the corporate architectural complex when this world has replaced a vision of the future with an image of the future?

But the profession is resourceful and in the same way that all contemporary architects play the ‘sustainability’ game, whether they are designing sustainable airports, sustainable shopping centres, sustainable luxury hotels, sustainable office blocks, sustainable cities in the middle of deserts or sustainable single private dwellings for the ultrarich, we will, no doubt, see a gritty ‘new realism’ starting to appear in architectural discourse that responds to the new economic conditions.[4]

Exactly how these new imperatives will drive the formal shape- making methodologies that have filled so many glossy pages for so long we shall see; and how will the interactive and responsive landscapes interact with, and respond to, bankruptcy, increasing unemployment and a general sense of despair?

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Progress
Contemporary culture has put its faith in the ideology of progress; progress will make things better, as well as making things faster and smaller (or bigger depending on the value system). This faith in progress and betterment fails to ring true in the light of economic downturn, environmental catastrophe, increased levels of crime, the threats of terrorism and global pandemics.[5] If the future cannot be guaranteed, where does that leave architecture?

However, a loss of faith is only a problem if that faith exists in the first place.

Within literature there is a major strand that looks at the future in a completely different way; science fiction can also be seen as a ‘utopian’ genre,[6] and in works by writers ranging from Jules Verne and HG Wells, through to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and more latterly Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, the future is depicted in a variety of different hues, not all of them as rosy as the futures promised by the architectural profession. As a result such speculations are often more believable.

While these writings appear to reflect on the future, more often than not they are actually concerned with issues contemporaneous to their production. To cite two obvious examples, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 (1949) are political reflections on the societies around them, and in Huxley’s case it is not altogether clear whether he is entirely critical of the world that he describes.

However, the writings of JG Ballard are of particular interest here as they filter through a number of the texts contained in this issue, either directly or lingering in the background.[7] Ballard is of special significance largely due to the fact that in so much of his writing architecture and architects play such a pivotal role.

The prescience of Ballard’s writing is obvious; his early works encompass environmental disaster, both drought and flooding; in the 1970s, novels such as Crash[8] and High-Rise[9] dealt with technological fetishisation, urban anomie and alienation, and, long before such issues hit the mainstream, he looked at the links between consumerism and social collapse. In his recent writings, Millennium People[10] and Kingdom Come,[11] Ballard depicts a Britain bereft of social values other than those of daytime TV and the shopping centre, and while his central characters can lack credibility his general description of the cultural landscape is far more accurate than almost anything that has been published in the pages of any recent architectural publication.

The future as presented by Ballard is often stark, bleak and uncompromising. There are few happy endings in his future. However, his faith in our collective ability to endure almost any hardship, drawn almost certainly from his experiences in Shanghai during the Second World War, leads us to believe that despite whatever is thrown at us we will adapt and we will survive.[12]

Like Ballard, let us not despair; though the future may be uncertain, uncertainty is not without its attractions.

The current economic situation offers great potential for developing a new agenda in architecture. The fact that the discipline of architecture has become synonymous with the architectural profession is something that will no doubt become contested as unemployment rises throughout the building industry[13] — those of us who can remember previous recessions can also remember them as highly creative periods. The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

This will bring to life the obvious gulf between expectation and reality that permeates architectural practice. Architecture is a wonderful discourse and training; however, it can be a very tedious job. Of course it does not have to be like this. Freed from the limitations of the profession, architectural projects can offer fantastic opportunities to develop narratives that can help us understand why we are doing the things we do.[14]

The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

In particular these uncertain times may be a blessing for a younger generation of designers; equipped with a vast array of technical skills and understanding they are almost certain to cope with the vagaries of future practice. As the skills demonstrated in many of the projects collected in this issue suggest, future architects may be just as adept at web design, graphics and film-making as they are at producing information for buildings.

The last few years have witnessed a gradual disenchantment within architectural education with the goals espoused by the architectural profession. Increased levels of student debt coupled with a creeping homogenisation of architectural practice have resulted in there being a darker aspect to student projects. Rather than shrinking away from the potential difficulties, the younger generation of architects may use information technologies to create new sites of architectural endeavour and give a whole new meaning to the term ‘architectural design’.

The essays and projects gathered together here cover a wide variety of positions. Many develop the themes suggested by Ballard and others, while some give the current situation a broader historical perspective, suggesting that certain of the scenarios that we face are not without precedent.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Matthew Gandy’s ‘Urban Flux’ gives a historical perspective to our current situation and argues that we need to recover the urban imagination in order to enrich 21st-century public culture. Michael Aling returns to his home town of Swindon, statistically the most average town in Britain, to find people sharing identities, stricken with gout and going to a deserted shopping centre for no real reason other than to fulfil a forgotten collective desire. And John Culmer Bell looks at the nature of electromagnetic radiation as a shaper of 19th- and 20th- century urban form, provocatively questioning whether sacrificing the pleasures of ‘noctambulism’ simply on environmental grounds is actually a good thing.

Bastian Glassner of uber-trendy video directors Lynn Fox presents a series of luxurious images, hybridising the body as meat, a clear homage to Francis Bacon (pun intended) with a bit of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse thrown in.

Soki So reimagines Piranesi’s Carceri as a near-future Hong Kong with a series of appropriately spectacular and sumptuous images that also address real concerns over the concept of urban intensity and vertical sprawl. Rubedo send out a provocative declaration concerning the omnipresence of technological systems and the necessity of developing transdisciplinary tactics to negotiate the immersive hybridised spaces of late capitalism.

Richard Bevan constructs a worryingly believable scenario whereby Heathrow airport becomes a carbon casino trading in carbon credits with air-mile-hungry oligarchs gambling to stay aloft, and Geoff Manaugh explores and questions the use of the term ‘feral city’. In ‘London After the Rain’, Ben Marzys presents a beautiful graphic Surrealist landscape, a posthuman picturesque. In ‘L.A.W.u.N Project #21: Cybucolia’ the Invisible University suggest that the near future may carry with it many of the seeds sown with 19th-century Romanticism; and Dan Farmer suggests that the near future may be all in the mind with excerpts from his research on cortical plasticity. Ben Nicholson reflects on his 2004 book The World Who Wants It?, one of the finest pieces of satirical writing of recent years, and presents a series of images that were absent from the original publication.

Simon Sellars and George Thomson explore the most explicitly Ballardian line, with Sellars looking at the aural nature of the urban environment, beautifully illustrated with Michelle Lord’s exquisite assemblages, and Thomson reimagining Ballard’s ‘Sound-Sweep’ as a community occupying a derelict M25.

Finally, Art in Ruins show work from installations that are 20 years old, an important conceptual reminder that none of the ideas in this issue are particularly new.

This issue was first conceived in 2007; the proposal was put forward in early 2008 and most of the text written late 2008/ early 2009. You will be reading this, at the very earliest, in autumn 2009. Like any other architectural project its relevance is shaped by a number of external forces far beyond the control of its authors; the economic events that are taking place as this text is being written (and rewritten) make any allusion to future certainties look foolish. The severity of the current economic situation makes any attempt to try to predict what light, if any, is at the end of this particular tunnel seem absurd. However, what happens if we imagine a number of scenarios, not necessarily the usual convivial scenarios that mainstream architecture usually relies on, but scenarios where the traditional certainties are replaced by something less predictable? Like the heroes of many of Ballard’s stories, the authors of the essays in this issue face the future with a sense of resigned stoicism and the ability to create beauty wherever they find it.

In many ways the near future could be very much like the past, with one obvious exception — it will be completely different.

Notes
[1] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1991, p 5.
[2] JG Ballard, High Rise, Jonathan Cape (London), 1975, p 7.
[3] See George Monbiot, ‘The Biggest Weirdest Rip Off Yet’, Guardian, 7 April 2009. In this article, Monbiot references a paper published in 2002 in the British Medical Journal in which five key criticisms were made of the PFI funding of hospitals: 1) that PFI brings no new capital investments; 2) that the assessments of value for money are skewed in favour of private finance; 3) the higher costs of PFI are due to financing costs which would be incurred under public financing; 4) any PFI schemes only show value for money after ‘risk transfer’, for risks that are not justified; 5) PFI more than doubles the cost of capital as a percentage of annual operating income. From Allyson M Pollock, Jean Shaoul and Neil Vickers, ‘Private finance and “value for money” in NHS hospitals: a policy in search of a rationale?’, BMJ, Vol 324, 18 May 2002, pp 1205–09.
[4] One can imagine that such texts have already begun to emanate from Rotterdam and Boston.
[5] For a critique of ‘progress’, see John Gray, Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions, Granta Books (London), 2004.
[6] See Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso (London and New York), 2005.
[7] Ballard has been a central interest of my diploma unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture where I have been running a programme entitled ‘Architecture of the Near Future’ for several years. The work of Michael Aling, Richard Bevan, Dan Farmer, Ben Marzys, Soki So and George Thomson, all contributors to this issue, came out of this programme.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash, Jonathan Cape (London), 1973.
[9] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit.
[10] JG Ballard, Millennium People, Flamingo (London), 2003.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[12] Beautifully described in his memoir Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, Fourth Estate (London), 2008.
[13] Job losses in architecture between February 2008 and February 2009 were reportedly up by 760%. See Will Hirst, ‘Architect Job Losses up by 760%’, Building Design, 20 March 2009, p 3.
[14] The drawings that accompany this essay come from my sheer enjoyment of producing CAD drawings simply because they are something I like doing.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Nic Clear.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard & the Built Enviroment
+ ‘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).

At Dan Hill’s always-impressive City of Sound, a recent post returns to Dan’s interest in Ballard’s Drowned World, positioning it as the middle panel of a triptych of novels (including Shute’s On the Beach and McCarthy’s The Road) that depict the planet ‘suffering some kind of apocalyptic event in different ways…’, each representing particular aspects of ‘denial’ that are in orbit around current debates on climate change. Hill suggests that all three works are ‘post-nuclear’, but isn’t it the case that the world in Ballard’s book has transformed due to ‘gigantic geophysical upheavals’, ie solar radiation? While in The Road, the low rumble of the percussive strike remembered in flashback could just as well be attributed to a meteor as much as a nuclear hit.

It’s a really intriguing post, however, and it would be great to see Dan expand it into a fullblown essay one day:

Clive Hamilton, in a brilliant essay in The Monthly on climate change denial, completes the Rumsfeldian square with his suggestion that climate change denial is about “unknown knowns, the facts we know but push from our consciousness.” On The Beach is more about this form of denial than reconciliation perhaps. It’s closer to ‘interpretative denial’ than ‘literal denial’ or ‘implicatory denial’, in Stanley Cohen’s model from his States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering.
…
JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) concerns a form of attempted psychological adaptation, perhaps also as denial. Ballard’s vision depicts living organisms, including humans, regressing to a prehistoric consciousness, a form of long dormant lizard brain awaking and grappling for control of consciousness and subconscious, in parallel with the rampantly fertile flora of the Triassic era. This is hardly denial, consciously or subconsciously. Rather, a surely doomed attempt by the human mind to reboot itself into another mode more appropriate to the conditions, like DOS suddenly re-emerging from within Windows.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007) is shattering, and one of the finest novels I’ve read. Certainly one of the most emotionally affecting. The protagonists in The Road are further advanced along this destructive linear progression. Indeed, further on down the road. They’re far removed from any possible form of denial. Their ash-cloaked dead world is one of grim realisation and numb despair.

Happy new year, indeed.

ABOVE: ‘London after the Rain’, by Ben Olszyna-Marzys. A film produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

In recognition of the sophistication of Ballard’s architectural analysis, a raft of discourse has been produced in recent times from within both academic and pop-cultural realms. This takes the form of tributes, analyses, ‘reimaginings’ and course syllabuses. In the influential architecture blog BLDGBLOG, for example, Geoff Manaugh sounds the note:

We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard … than we do from Le Corbusier. The good city form of tomorrow is a refugee camp built by Brown & Root; the world’s largest architectural client is the U.S. Department of Defense. More people now live in overseas military camps than in houses designed by Mies van der Rohe — yet we study Mies van der Rohe.

While Le Corbusier appears to be (mis)remembered by history for supposedly self-important, grandiose plans to realise an architectural utopia that ignored the basic requirements of its inhabitants, Ballard, according to Manaugh, assumes increasing importance for the manner in which his work acutely analyses the ways in which the built environment can impact psychologically on its users and inhabitants. This includes, he elaborates, an identification of a ‘constant dissatisfaction with … architectural surroundings [that] becomes a kind of quiet aggression, an unarticulated suburban angst’. For Manaugh, the ‘psycho spatial’ nature of ‘Ballardian space’ is best articulated by Concrete Island, High-Rise and Super-Cannes, which he has utilised to varying degrees as the cornerstones of several BDLGBLOG posts.

Within the creative arts, the Birmingham-based artist Michelle Lord exhibited a series of images that used imagery from Concrete Island and Ballard’s novella ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976) to examine the legacy of Brutalist architecture in Britain. Lord’s work explicitly critiques the utopian ‘social idealism’ of Brutalism, itself a descendant of the Le Corbusier school of architecture, and the fashion in which it disregarded ‘the communal, historic and surrounding built environment’. Yet Lord also successfully captures the sense of ambivalence that powers ‘The Ultimate City’, with its depiction of a far-future, ‘post technological’ world in which the harshness of the urban environment is rejected in favour of a ‘green’, sterile ecotopia, only to be fatally underscored by a lingering lament for the decline of industrial landscapes.

Academically, Ballardian Studies is an emerging discipline in architectural schools. Here, the website of the London-based firm, Azhar Architecture, is instructive, featuring a list entitled ‘What’s being recommended in Architecture Schools: A Sample’. High-Rise, tracking the breakdown of social order in a Corbusian apartment block, is included alongside works from Rem Koolhaas, Mike Davis, Deleuze & Guattari and Guy Debord. At Columbia University’s Department of English & Comparative Literature, Professor Ursula Heise taught a subject entitled ‘Modern and Postmodern Cities’, in which depictions of ‘the metropolis and urban life’ were considered in 20th-century literature. One session was given over to two Ballard short stories, ‘The Concentration City’ (1957) and ‘Billennium’ (1962), which rank among the author’s most effective portrayals of the sensory overload of big-city life. Conceptually, the stories are at polar opposites, thematically they are of a piece: the absolute alliance of architecture with late capitalism. ‘Billennium’ is concerned with the complete contraction of public and private space by an overbearing architecture, while ‘Concentration City’ is based on the premise that the city is ever-expanding, without limits, its boundaries unable to be located by the central protagonist, who, no matter how far he travels, ends up where he started.

But the most ambitious academic program to date is almost certainly ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’, which was taught by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London in 2007-08. For Clear and Kennedy, the ‘speculative’ nature of Ballardian architectural space is all-important. The course, which utilised film and animation, video and motion-graphic techniques to devise representations of ‘synthetic space’, challenged students to examine architectural themes across the broad span of Ballard’s writing. The aim was to process the manner by which he deploys ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ environments to form a coherent analysis of the challenges inherent in a supersaturated technological world. Clear and Kennedy, like Manaugh, also point to the psychological effects of architecture, which leads on to their consideration of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s film, London Orbital, as a text not only influenced by Ballard but also by the psychogeographical revival that Sinclair is closely associated with.

I recall in my interview with Manaugh, where I mentioned how I’d love to see Ballard taught in architectural schools. Geoff enthusiastically replied, ‘I would love to do this — it’s actually a conscious fantasy of mine…’ You can understand my excitement upon learning of Unit 15! I decided therefore to contact Nic Clear, and pin him down about Ballard, architecture and the fabulous work created by Unit 15, as well as the new U15 program for 2008-09, ‘The Near Future Part II’, which questions whether the utopianism of the ‘corporate architectural complex’ is viable in a world riven by conflict.

Simon Sellars

ABOVE: ‘The Sound-Sweep’, by George Thomson, based on the story by J.G. Ballard. A film produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

J G Ballard is one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the C20th, and beginning of the C21st. His writing has encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis to technological fetishism and augmentation, and from urban ruination to suburban mob culture, and he has pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without comparison.

His understanding of architecture, and architects, and his prophetic visions make Ballard one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns. From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. Rather than examining specific texts, Unit 15 will be following themes implicit in Ballard’s writing.

Unit 15 will also be examining filmic interpretations of his writing, particularly David Cronenberg’s Crash and Jonathan Weiss’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and to a lesser extent Steven Spielberg’s Empire Of The Sun. We shall also be looking at films inspired by Ballard’s work especially Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital. In short, we shall be examining all aspects of culture that can be considered BALLARDIAN.

Nic Clear & Simon Kennedy, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’, Unit 15, Bartlett School of Architecture, 2007-08.

SIMON SELLARS: Nic, how did the idea for ‘Crash: Architectures Of The Near Future’ come about?

NIC CLEAR: I’ve been interested in Ballard’s writing for many years; I was a big Joy Division fan and read The Atrocity Exhibition simply because they wrote a song with the same name. More recently, it struck me that the themes in Ballard’s work seem to address the issues about the built environment that architectural discourse seems to avoid: namely, how people actually operate within a social context where things are either falling, or have fallen apart. Architecture always seems to present this impossibly rosy view of the future and seems unable to deal with the possibility of failure, even though all architecture in some way fails.

SS: How have your students responded to Ballard’s work?

NC: The projects have been very successful, and the use of a literary point of departure has been quite liberating. The Ballardian theme has allowed students to really speculate on what they are doing, but also, more importantly, why they are doing it.

SS: Besides Unit 15, it seems there are a few architects, architectural critics, architecturally-minded artists and architecture schools that are starting to take notice of Ballard’s work.

NC: I’m not sure how many architects are being influenced by Ballard in their work, especially within ‘commercial’ architecture — maybe the forthcoming recession will make architects aware of the Ballardian possibilities of architecture. 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. However, I think that there is a desire to face up to a future that deals with a system in crisis, which Ballard articulates so brilliantly. I was recently reading Mike Davis’s breathtaking collection of essays, Dead Cities, and was constantly thinking ‘this is so Ballardian’. Also, writers like Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, who have been influenced by Ballard, are still incredibly important and influential. Obviously Ballard’s early identification of global environmental issues also makes him incredibly pertinent to many people. However Ballard does not give easy, or even any answers and this puts off many people. Given the current economic and environmental conditions, he seems more prescient than ever, not simply because of the situations he describes, but because he offers a mindset for dealing with these issues.

Many people may think that Ballard’s characters face the scenarios he creates with an unbelievable stoicism, although Ballard has an advantage over us, as most of us have never had to face any kind of catastrophe. I think the experiences of life in Shanghai during WWII made Jim believe that the human race is able to endure — and inflict — almost any horror imaginable.

ABOVE: A film by Michael Aling, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: A wider, and resurgent, trend in film and literature, which Ballard seems to have anticipated, is the idea that on some level we secretly desire the apocalypse, that we welcome the chance to explore the farthest limits of alienation. This is something that Chris Nakashima-Brown articulates very well: ‘The persistence of post-apocalyptic scenarios (as well as many disaster movies) expresses a latent yearning for the destruction of the state apparatus and the abolition of private property. At a deeper psychological level … the idea of roaming a depopulated earth rummaging for useful artifacts articulates the extent of our individual alienation in a thoroughly commodified society.’

NC: Many people may fantasise about these scenarios, but when it comes to losing their own luxuries, people will vote for whoever offers the easiest way out — which most often involves blaming someone else. The most depressing part of how current economic and social structures start falling apart is that, instead of embracing the liberating potential of re-structuring and re-organising, politically things could start getting much more conservative. This is obviously another common theme in Ballard. I grew up in the 70s with the three-day week and the winter of discontent, with the parks of London used as rubbish dumps, but for me it was great power cuts and no school, and out of it came punk … yet the down side was Thatcherism. Obviously the next few years will be catastrophic for ‘big business’ (is that so bad?), and the fall out will be difficult for many, but we will adjust to yet another ‘new normal’. We may even in the long run be better off as a society for it.

Personally, this will be my third major recession, and they are always the most productive times: when no one has money, money stops mattering.

SS: High-Rise is the obvious book to cite when discussing Ballard and architecture. Which of his other works is relevant?

NC: It’s easier to say which one’s aren’t relevant, and the answer to that is probably none! Crash is a personal favourite, I like the perversity of it; it takes the whole modernist fetishisation of technology and mixes it with contemporary obsessions like celebrity cults. The problem with the film was that it was soft-core pornography — all those shots of Debra Unger’s stockings — when really the book is quite hardcore: the leaky orifices, the polysexuality and the car as augmented bodily technology. It’s a surrealist masterpiece up there with Bataille’s The Story of the Eye and Duchamp’s ‘The Large Glass’.

SS: When I interviewed Geoff Manaugh, he defined ‘Ballardian space’ as ‘psycho spatial’. I’d be interested in your take.

NC: If you take Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace, remove the post-structuralist jargon, add some dark humour and set it on the periphery of any declining western industrialised city — especially London — then you are pretty close.

SS: Does this relate to Unit 15′s research into ‘synthetic space’?

NC: Synthetic space is the merging of the actual and virtual; writers like Ballard and Burroughs have been describing synthetic space for years. Within architectural terms, I see it as the inability to differentiate between spaces and their representations — where spatial representations are increasingly becoming spatial propositions.

SS: Ballard is famously obsessive about multi-storey car parks. What do they mean to him, do you think?

NC: The defining symbol of the 20th century is the motor car, and car parks are part palace and part mausoleum. They also tend to be quite ugly and boring, though often in a strangely beautiful and interesting way, and that sort of perversity defines Ballard’s aesthetic.

SS: For my PhD, I was researching contemporary attitudes towards modernist architecture and came across the critical reaction to the 2006 exhibition on modernist art at the V&A. I was completely shocked by Simon Jenkins’ response, which verged on demonic possession. He took particular exception to modernist architects, who he said were ‘the worst offenders because they became the most powerful’, and equates them with Hitler. (But as Deyan Sudjic riposted, such a caricature misrepresents ‘the full and often contradictory range of Modernist expression… none of which seemed to be inspiring much actual terror on the day I went’.) Why does Brutalist architecture in Britain continue to provoke such rage?

NC: The British establishment, and the English in particular, still have a real suspicion of architectural modernism, seeing it as ‘elitist’, ‘European’ and ‘socialist’. Brutalism especially has become a scapegoat for the failure of that post-war welfare state optimism. Of course, this is rubbish: the real failure lies in the political and cultural failure to actually bring about a more egalitarian and democratic society.

SS: On the other hand, as the antithesis to Jenkins, Ballard said: ‘I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton’.

NC: I always imagine that Eden-Olympia in Super-Cannes was designed by someone like Manser. But lets face it, we can’t always trust such pronouncements by Jim, especially if it was for the benefit of the Guardian — imagine all that liberal angst and hand wringing.

ABOVE: A film by Peter Kidger, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: In his review of Davis’s City of Quartz, Ballard welcomes ‘unrestricted urban sprawl, the decentred metropolis, a transient airport culture, gated communities and an absence of traditional civic pride’. He suggests that architects and urban planners need to ‘make the most of this’, letting the environment guide them almost as if it is sentient, rather than conforming to the reverse, ie, the old ideal of the arrogant architect imposing his grand vision on the environment (in High-Rise, this was the downfall of the architect Royal). Do you agree with Ballard?

NC: ‘Unrestricted’ would be the key term; the brilliance of Davis’s analysis is to show how clearly urban planning follows such a narrow set of vested interests. Less planning, less controls, less regulation would only work if it also meant less greed, and what are the chances of that? It reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote on the free market: ‘it sounds like a great idea, maybe we should try it sometime’.

SS: Rem Koolhaas seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to some of the architects in Ballard’s stories: the ego, the vainglory, the architect as self-styled eccentric…

NC: He probably likes to think he does. I like Ballard’s architects: they seem genuinely optimistic and have a faith, albeit misguided, in the power of architecture to change society for the good. They are of a much older generation — Ballard’s. I bet Robert Maitland would send angry letters into Building Design, the weekly British architectural newspaper, complaining about these new-fangled projects.

Rem’s recent work, especially in China, strikes me as cynical. His obsession with celebrity, especially his own, seems to be his main driving force, and like many ‘good’ Marxists of his generation, he has become a consummate capitalist. He is much more like Wilder Penrose from Super-Cannes — without the humour.

SS: Does architecture still have an image problem, then, in terms of this archetype of the arrogant, narcissistic architect imposing his vision on the people?

NC: Yes, because most of us are arrogant and narcissistic.

SS: In books such as Concrete Island and stories like ‘The Ultimate City’, Ballard depicts architecture as an instrument of oppressive capitalism, and architects as contributing to that oppression. For Ballard, it seems to me, no architect can be truly radical, or can truly think of architecture as ‘art’ when they are either carrying out the wishes of the State, mobilising state funds to realise their designs, or carrying out the desires of big business. Is this an accurate summation of architectural practice today? How would you reconcile that frustration with a pure creative spirit?

NC: I started my postgraduate dissertation in 1989 with a quote from Frederic Jameson: ‘Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.’

Little has changed since; in fact, things have got worse. Architecture is now synonymous with the architectural profession (or Corporate Architectural Complex), speculation is financial rather than intellectual, and architects have been complicit with the kind of greedy thinking and acting that has got us into the current global financial crisis. We have to stop thinking about architecture simply in terms of building buildings — that’s why I am so interested in looking at other models and disciplines to draw inspiration from.

SS: Ballard says that ‘Novelty architecture dominates throughout the world, pitched like the movies at the bored teenager inside all of us.’ Any thoughts on that?

NC: For novelty architecture, see my answer on Rem. A couple of years ago I used the phrase ‘Shapist Architecture’, taken from Tony Hancock’s 1961 film The Rebel, a satire on the art world. At one point he says, ‘I don’t paint the object, I paint the shape around the object’. Developments in the use of computer software have allowed architects to come up with a variety of three-dimensional forms, which has led to a whole raft of ‘blobby’ buildings, a lot of which appear to be self-indulgent and that confuse ‘looking interesting’ with ‘being interesting’ and ‘looking complex’ with ‘complexity’. We have an architecture of the image.

SS: In Ballard, architecture is often used as a form of social control. Did you perceive any similarities between the nature and cause of the banlieue riots in France in 2005, and the breakdown of society depicted in High-Rise?

NC: Not really. High Rise is about a rejection of convivial social structures and returning to a more ‘primitive’ social model. There is a brilliant French film from 1973 called Themroc
directed by Claude Faraldo, which seems to have a greater affinity with High-Rise, published two years later. In it, a blue-collar worker rejects his mundane life, knocks the front wall out of his apartment and starts living like a caveman. However, Kingdom Come, in many ways, does describes the type of anomie and alienation that dominates the urban periphery. Boredom and disenfranchisement brought about by simply being defined by what we consume are the most incendiary factors in the contemporary city.

ABOVE: A film by Dan Farmer, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: Do you think Ballard has much at all to do with psychogeographical conceptions of urban space? He appears to have been co-opted into the ‘movement’, such as it is.

NC: It seems everyone’s a psychogeographer nowadays. Psychogeography was originally articulated by the Situationists as an experimental form of urbanism that attempted a critique of the hegemonic values of urban planning and zoning by emphasising the ‘transience’ of the urban experience. The political aspect of psychogeography has been diminished in favour of a ‘poetics’ of the city. I think Ballard in some of his writing retains a lot more of that political conception of psychogeography than many who have fashionably co-opted that term.

SS: What role does film, video, animation and motion graphics play in your course? How can film methodology help to illuminate architectural design?

NC: My main interest in time-based techniques is the ability to tell stories. However, at a pedagogic level, working with film, video and animation does teach a whole number of organisational and aesthetic skills, so despite my anti-profession rhetoric, I seem to be doing a very good job in equipping students to operate very successfully within the profession.

SS: In The Atrocity Exhibition, there are many scenarios in which mental patients are encouraged to make their own films as therapy. Without wishing to casting aspersions on the mental health of your students(!), were the many references to DIY film aesthetics in the book an inspiration for your decision to use Ballard and film as a way into thinking about architecture? (Recall that in Atrocity, these amateur films recast the media landscape and the built environment in ‘ways that make sense’.)

NC: The way I teach is very much geared toward helping students find a voice, whether that is therapeutic is unimportant (to me) — besides, I hate that psychoanalytic model of teaching, just as much as I hate the paternalistic model.

SS: Sure, but I wasn’t really referring to the thereaputic aspects, though, more the DIY angle and the mediation of the built environment.

NC: The main decision to start using film in the way I teach architecture, which I have been doing since 1999, was simply because it was what I was doing myself. The rise of CGI, animation and the availability of digital video made it a much more accessible and viable way of generating, developing and communicating architectural and spatial ideas and narratives. The influence of lo-fi (as opposed to DIY) artists and filmmakers such as Bruce Nauman or Burroughs was an attraction, but it was the availability of the technology that got me going.

SS: Do you think Ballard is an especially ‘filmic’ or ‘cinematic’ writer?

NC: Yes, which is why the English literary establishment still treats him with suspicion since he is not a ‘literary’ writer. Ballard wants to create images and tell stories rather than impress with literary form.

SS: I think the films your students have turned out are simply stunning, especially considering they don’t have a ‘studio budget’ to work with — the filmmakers, as well as you and everyone involved, should be applauded. But besides making films, you also looked at feature-film versions of Ballard’s work. How can an analysis of these adaptations help in understanding ‘speculative, narrative architectures’ in Ballard’s writing?

NC: I have taken this particular position for two reasons: to engage with a critique of contemporary architecture, and because it’ s fun. The filmic analysis was just a starting point; out of all the films we watched, Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition and Sinclair and Petit’s London Orbital were the most influential.

Architecture should not be left to architects — the whole discourse needs opening up. The reason why I earlier questioned whether architectural criticism exists is simply because architecture is an incredibly insular and hermetic discipline — no one dares criticise the Rems, the Dannys or the Zahas for fear of being locked out. Magazines need content and they publish pretty much anything and everything without questioning it; if they did question it, then the content would dry up.

SS: It’s good to see Jonathan Weiss’s film gaining recognition. What do you appreciate about it?

NC: The fact that he had the guts to take it on with virtually no budget. The Atrocity Exhibition is the most ‘Burroughsian’ of all Ballard’s writing and I think Weiss has captured that. The use of found footage and the dislocated time line have echoes in the literary character of the book, and bits of the film are extremely beautiful to look at. I can’t stand the criticism that it doesn’t make sense or is difficult: these criticisms seem to ignore the difficulties of the original text.

ABOVE: ‘The Knife’ by Mario Balducci, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: Who else do you think would make a good fist of adapting Ballard?

NC: Taakishi Miike to direct High Rise as a total gore-fest, Michael Mann to direct Super-Cannes — and I’m working on an adaptation of ‘Motel Architecture’.

SS: Taakishi Miike? Good call! But tell me about your own adaptation.

NC: I’m going through the shower scene from Pyscho frame by frame to develop the analysis that JG alludes to in ‘Motel Architecture’. I’ve mapped out a rough script and hope to shoot something in the new year. Part of what I am doing for ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design I’m guest editing, will be based on this project (some sort of ‘House Of The Future’) — the other part is an essay/rant against the architectural profession.

At the time he had been sitting in his chair in the centre of the solarium, bathing in the warm artificial light that flowed through the ceiling vents and watching the shower sequence from Psycho on the master screen. The brilliance of this tour de force never ceased to astonish Pangborn. He had played the sequence to himself hundreds of times, frozen every frame and explored it in close-up, separately recorded sections of the action and displayed them on the dozen smaller screens around the master display. The extraordinary relationship between the geometry of the shower stall and the anatomy of the murdered woman’s body seemed to hold the clue to the real meaning of everything in Pangborn’s world, to the unstated connections between his own musculature and the immaculate glass and chromium universe of the solarium. In his headier moments Pangborn was convinced that the secret formulas of his tenancy of time and space were contained somewhere within this endlessly repeated clip of film.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978).

SS: The guest issue of AD was originally going to be explicitly ‘Ballardian, wasn’t it?

NC: The publication, in its current form, has changed from being explicitly about Ballard and Ballard’s writings to something more general: an antidote to the shiny ‘bigness’, ‘everything’s great’ vision of contemporary architecture presented by the mainstream architectural press. The guiding principles are still thoroughly ‘Ballardian’, even though I have opened the discussion up. I would still like to do a purely Ballardian book and will use The Near Future as a first step.

This is the blurb for the issue, which I think neatly sums up my aims for the whole Near Future project:

For the last 20 years, the architectural profession has been complicit with the laissez-faire ideology of late capitalism, assuming that the economic forces of growth and expansion are the only means by which society can develop and prosper.

The current economic crisis makes us question whether a future of unlimited growth is not only possible, but taking into account environmental factors, actually advisable. We have reached a moment of crisis — economic, environmental and technological — where we have to make choices about the type of future that we want, but also the type of future we can actually achieve.

It would appear that the Architectural Profession has nothing to say except ‘business as usual’, as it continues to produce bright, shiny renders of schemes that will sit empty for years. This proposed issue of Architectural Design offers a series of alternate voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and trying to find visions of the future, not simply images of the future.

The proposed issue offers a diverse set of ideas that explore a number of possible ‘Near Futures’ — futures that may be influenced the resurgence of gout in Swindon, or take precedent from an analysis of the political landscape of Southern Italy where in some areas a state of effective lawlessness exists.

The issue combines critical analysis with gorgeous graphics, and features work produced at the margins of contemporary architectural practice. Drawing on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, post-modern geography, post-economics, cybernetics, developments in neurology as well as the fictional writings of authors such as J G Ballard and William Gibson, ‘The Near Future’ will present a series of polemical blasts that are intended to rock the cosy world of architectural discourse.

Thank you, Nic Clear and Unit 15. ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design guest-edited by Nic, will be published in September 2009.

ABOVE: ‘Nic’s right-hand talking to Evis, starring Nic Clear’. Video via archimaxx.

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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

ABOVE: Troy self-portrait.

Via Boing Boing (via Telstar Logistics):

Photographer Troy Paiva has a new book out, and it’s chock full of superb nighttime photos taken at abandoned military bases, aircraft boneyards, auto junkyards, and other wonderfully desolate places. Troy’s book is called Night Visions: The Art of Urban Exploration, and it makes heavy use of his favorite photo technique: Iong-exposure nighttime shots that uses only natural moonlight and simple flashlights to capture ruined night scenes in spooky detail.

The pictures in Night Visions look great, and this Friday, August 1, Chronicle Books is throwing a party to celebrate the its release in San Francisco at the 111 Minna Gallery from 7 to 9 pm.

Troy was, of course, recently interviewed here on Ballardian and Chronicles Book is also the publisher of another Ballardian interviewee, Geoff Manaugh (whose BLDGBLOG book will be out next year).

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.

Here’s the info (via the JGB Yahoo list):

Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J.G. Ballard

Series Editors: Jeannette Baxter, Sebastian Groes, Sean Matthews

Editor: Jeannette Baxter

J.G. Ballard is one of the most significant British writers of the contemporary period. His award-winning novels are stock features of school and university reading lists, yet the appeal of Ballard’s idiosyncratic imagination is such that his work also enjoys something of a cult status with the reading public. The hugely successful cinematic adaptations of Empire of the Sun (Spielberg, 1987) and Crash (Cronenberg, 1996) further confirm Ballard’s unique place within the literary, cultural and popular imaginations.

Although J. G. Ballard is known primarily as a novelist, he is also the author of over one hundred short stories, a number of which have been adapted for television and theatre. For the first time, Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard places a discussion of Ballard’s short stories alongside readings of the major novels in order to explore issues of form, narrative and experimentation.

Another defining element of this volume is its coverage of Ballard’s extensive catalogue of cultural journalism. Over the course of five decades, Ballard has written for publications as various as The Daily Telegraph, Playboy, the Guardian, Time Out, New Worlds, The Times and Vogue. Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard is the first study of its kind to explore Ballard’s significance as a cultural commentator, and to investigate the relationship between his creative and critical writings.

Whilst offering fresh readings of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard’s writing, including history, sexuality, violence, consumer capitalism, and urban space, this edition of Contemporary Critical Perspectives engages with hitherto unexplored questions of post 9/11 politics, terrorism, neo-imperialism, science, morality and ethics.

Contents:

General Introduction: Jeannette Baxter (UEA)

Biography/Chronology: Jeannette Baxter

Chapter 1: Brian Baker(Lancaster) ‘The Geometry of the Space Age: J. G. Ballard’s short fiction and science fiction of the 1960s’: a reassessment of J. G. Ballard’s early work.’

Chapter 2: Jake Huntley (UEA) ‘Re-reading The Atrocity Exhibition.’

Chapter 3: Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope), ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: Place and Space in the Work of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 4: Corin Depper (Kingston), ‘Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 5: Umberto Rossi Mind is the Battlefield: Reading Ballard’s ‘Life Trilogy’ as War Literature

Chapter 6: David Pringle, ‘The genres of J. G. Ballard’s non-fiction.’

Chapter 7: Jeannette Baxter (UEA), ‘Visions of Europe in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes’

Chapter 8: Philip Tew (Brunel), ‘The possibilities of sacrifice, the certainties of trauma: J. G. Ballard’s Postmillennial Fiction.’

An interview with J.G. Ballard by Jeannette Baxter

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

Above: the offending vehicle.

The Zodiac 3000 exhibition in Birmingham, dedicated to and inspired by Ballard, has already drawn first blood, severely disrupting the stasis of surrounding Brum suburbia. As my snout, Tim C., notes, “in a minor mirroring of the moral outrage occasioned by Ballard’s 1970 Arts Lab exhibition, the Birmingham Mail is on the case”:

THIS clapped-out car may look ready for the breakers’ yard, but angry Birmingham families have been told it is “art”. Fuming residents at Maple Road, Bournville, today blasted art centre bosses for allowing the “eyesore” to be left yards from their homes.

The Mercedes is on display outside Bournville Centre for Visual Arts as part of a month-long exhibition devoted to the work of British author JG Ballard, who wrote the controversial novel Crash.

Residents said it lowered the tone of George Cadbury’s model village. Cadbury worker Robert Potter, aged 59, said: “It’s an eyesore. This is a nice area, and we are trying to keep up standards. It would be towed away if it was parked on the street.”

Crash, published in 1973, features characters who become sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. It was later filmed by Canadian director David Cronenberg.

Art exhibition curator Andrew Hunt said: “Art is meant to be provocative. “Ballard is fixated with white, middle-class suburbs, which Bournville is. It’s holding a mirror to the idea of white ghettoes and the ideology behind them.

Michelle Lord, whose “Future Ruins” series featured on Ballardian here and here, is participating in a new exhibition entitled “Relocating Absence”, which runs from 18 April to 4 May 2008.

RELOCATING ABSENCE
Elevator Gallery
Mother Studios, Queens Yard, White Post Lane,
Hackney Wick, London E9 5EN

www.elevatorgallery.co.uk
www.myspace.com/elevatorgallery

“Future Ruins” appears alongside the work of Brada Barassi, Craig Cooper, Amelia Crouch, Hondartza Fraga, Zbigniew Tomasz Kotkiewicz, Anastasia Loginova, Erin Newell, Ellakajsa Nordström, Anahita Razmi, Erica Scourti, Mikio Saito and Youngho Lee.

The exhibition is curated by Elisa Tosoni, Cherie-Marie Veiderveld and Simon Reuben White.

Relocating Absence is a group exhibition showcasing the work of thirteen internationally emerging artists. Through a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, video, photography and drawing, the exhibition offers a series of artistic interpretations of the theme, often playing with the constants of space and time. Absence, in fact, is essentially temporal – it is located where something was: it lies between the realms of Being (object) and Knowledge (perception, creation of a mental image).

Absence can be intended as a state of being, as a period of time, as a lack, or even desire, or as the inattention to present surroundings or occurrences. All these connotations are encountered in the exhibition, which, in fact, proposes an open-ended investigation of the concepts of belonging, displacement, repetition, visual and literary narrative, emotional and physical distance, as well as archive, memory and diary keeping.

The artists have created presence from absence, erased the pre-existent iconography of presence, drawn the viewers’ gaze to details that would otherwise have remained long unnoticed. These acts of relocating, of replacing, collecting or remembering what was there continue absence into the future: new tangible objects now substitute or relocate a previous absence, soon to leave room to new absences, in the viewer’s mind.

Elisa Tosoni, 2008.

‘the narcissism of things’, by infinite thØught.

infinite thØught is a blog of critical theory that’s not afraid to use ‘mock’ tactics, ie, it can have a laugh and be unforced, hilarious and poignant about it. It also has a pig fixation that I don’t really get (Is it after Orwell? Or is it a Chris Marker-style intervention from the non-human world?) and that lately has manifested itself in the creation of a lolpig farm.

In fact, i.t. herself (also of the rad-film collective, kino fist) seems to have abandoned writing of late, but it’s not solely down to all that hyperporcine activity. She has been posting a series of photo essays, some captioned, some not, almost one a week for the last month or so.

This one, ‘the narcissism of things’, is outstanding, with its ‘pictures of Thames wasteland’ refracted through rusty industrial puddles.

And the latest is this one, ‘the suburbs dream of violence: a trip to bluewater’, based around the Bluewater shopping centre, one of the inspirations for the Metro-Centre in Ballard’s Kingdom Come. Included with each photo is a judiciously selected quote from K.C.

‘the suburbs dream of violence: a trip to bluewater’, by infinite thØught.

Death had no place in the Metro-Centre, which had abolished time and the seasons, past and future.

Ballard, Kingdom Come.

Of course, Bluewater inspired Ballard to implore Iain Sinclair to blow it up in the London Orbital film, and i.t. is not above a spot of Ballard-style urban anarchy herself, having previously used K.C. as a kind of instruction manual for the all-or-nothing destruction of the Millennium Dome.

‘Damn you! Damn you all to hell!’ Still from Planet of the Apes, 1968.

Ben alerts us to Gerry Canavan’s extensive collection of apocalyptic images featuring a ruined Statue of Liberty. According to Gerry:

While writing the post, in connection with Ryan’s theory that the most salient feature of apocalypse in science fiction is the way in which the same images are simply repackaged for us over and over again, I was struck by the recurrence of a ruined Statue of Liberty as perhaps the quintessential icon of disaster since the 1940s. So struck, in fact, that I began to obsessively collect these images from the ‘net wherever I could find them. Submitted for your approval, the fruits of my labor…

Ballard, of course, also featured a ruined Statue of Liberty in his post-apocalyptic novel Hello America — albeit underwater rather than half buried in sand and debris:

Wayne struck the rail with both fists. He laughed aloud as the sailors ran past him. He realised now what had been missing from the mental picture of New York harbour he had carried with him across the Atlantic.

‘Wayne, for heaven’s sake…’ Anne Summers tried to calm him. ‘You’re going to have to swim, you know.’

‘Liberty! Professor Summers, don’t you remember?’ Wayne pointed to the Jersey shore, where a rocky island stood in the main channel. Even now the remains of a classical pedestal could be seen. ‘The Statue of Liberty!’

They stared into the water beside the Apollo. The lamp held aloft for generations of immigrants from the Old World had vanished, but the crown still remained around the figure’s head. One of its radiating spikes had left a ten-yard- long gash in the Apollo’s hull.

‘You’re right, Wayne. My God, though, we’re going down!’ Anne Summers looked round wildly, a hand to her blonde bun. ‘The equipment, Paul! What’s the matter with Steiner?’

The first rusty water foamed from the fore-mast pump-heads. Orlowski was screaming at the Captain, his plump index finger raised accusingly. But Steiner strolled in a leisurely way around the helm, a satisfied light in his eyes. He ignored the commissar and the pandemonium on the deck, his mouth relaxed as he spoke to the engine-room on the brass voice tube.

Below the stern the two-bladed propeller thwacked the water. A heavy black smoke billowed from the funnel. The Apollo made way, dipping cumbersomely through the waves. The cold pump-water raced across the deck to the scuppers, sluicing around Wayne’s ankles. Ricci and Anne Summers backed off, but Wayne stared down at the immense statue moving away from them.

At the climax of the evacuation of America, under the personal control of President Brown, the Statue of Liberty had been lowered from her plinth and prepared for shipment to the new American colonies in Europe. In a sudden storm, however, the wooden lighter built to transport the statue had broken loose from its tugs, drifted free across the bay and lost its bows on the razor-sharp keel of a scuttled freighter. In the chaos that filled the final days of the evacuation the exact location of the statue had never been established, and she had been left to break up in the cold waters of the next century.

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

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

The publicity machine is warming up for Ballard’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life, due for publication February 2008.

First up, we have news of an event featuring Ballard at the Southbank Centre on Wednesday, 20 February 2008, at 7:30pm. Next, there is a new interview with him over at the Bookseller to promote the book.

Sample quotes from the interview:

The shock of coming to England in 1946 is something that has never left me. Very few people now remember quite how bleak life here was. Obviously, the country was exhausted by the war, and visibly shattered. Large areas of London and Birmingham and Manchester were bomb sites.

Surrealism had a big effect on me then, and still does. It explained things. Partly it was that war is surreal in its effects: the bus on top of a block of apartments, thrown there by a bomb; the whole wall of a tall building collapsed, so you can see dozens of flats, like a doll’s house, with the furniture still in place… if you looked at things through the eyes of the surrealist painters, everything was upside down and you got bizarre things being looked on as though they were completely ordinary.

A very important thing for me was being a medical student for a couple of years… Each of us had a little pine box which we kept under our beds containing a human skeleton. Mine was quite small and I was assured it was not that of a child, but of a peasant from Southeast Asia. These were the kind of dead I’d seen [in Shanghai] and now I slept in my bed with this coffin below me.

Note that elsewhere in this piece, Ballard is recorded as saying he wrote The Kindness of Strangers — not The Kindness of Women. Hopefully, that’s a transcription error.

[ Thanks Mike B. and Mike H. ]

A-bomb explosion, Bikini Atoll, 25 July, 1946.

I’m a scholar, I teach Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. My PhD (1999) was on Angela Carter and it got me a job there as assistant professor. But in my country, to be a scholar you need one more degree — you need to write something like a post-doctoral thesis — and you have about ten years to write it. To cut a long story short, one day in 2000 I said to myself: ‘J.G. Ballard’.

Which brings us to the introduction from Grave New World, presented here as a sampler of my work.

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

For more information on the book, please contact Dominika at dominika dot oramus at neostrada dot pl.

NOTE: Part Two is now available.

Are we living in the happy times of a social utopia where everybody can participate equally in the blessings of advanced technology, modern science and sophisticated communications systems? Are we witness to the true ‘Brave New World’ the human race has dreamt of for generations? Or is our contemporary reality yet another ‘Grave New World’ [1] — a dystopian land of social manipulation and hegemonic mass media? Is ours a world that denies free will, breeds psychopathologies and supplants first-hand experience with simulacra? In 1932 Aldous Huxley published his Brave New World as a warning against what the future might bring. And indeed, throughout the last century numerous philosophers, historians, sociologists, and fiction writers repeated similar concerns and fears. In that same year, 1932, the first one-volume English translation of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was published, thereby introducing to English literary culture the idea of an inevitable end to every civilization, ours included. His study prompted Arnold Toynbee to begin work on his monumental opus A Study of History, wherein he discusses a host of past human civilizations and points to the causes of their fall, indirectly suggesting that our own Western culture is well advanced on its own way to disintegration. Arnold Toynbee writes:

The self-inflicted wounds from which civilizations die are not these of a material order. In the past, at any rate, it has been the spiritual wounds that have proved incurable (Toynbee 1949: 135).

It seems appropriate to me to start the present study of J.G. Ballard by quoting the above passage from Toynbee’s lecture ‘The International Outlook’; coming in the wake of World War II, it reveals the sad truth about civilizations in general: they are universally threatened with decline and demise. Whatever may precipitate the West’s fall will involve external factors (waves of immigration, dangerous weapons in irresponsible foreign hands, terrorism, alien cultures and religions filling in the spiritual vacuum, etc.), but these matters will be allowed in only because of the internal spiritual damage that is already underway. 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. Though Western civilization has apparently succeeded in perpetuating itself to the new millennium in having overcome communism and avoided the threat of a Third World War, nuclear catastrophe and internal collapse, for Ballard Huxley’s [2] vision remains uncanny in the way it is coming true. At least in some of its key aspects.

In this book I read Ballard’s fiction (and some of his non-fiction) as a record of the gradual internal degeneration of Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century. In sundry ways and styles Ballard’s ostensibly very heterogeneous oeuvre depicts the same intangible catastrophe that has happened to the world. Contemporary reality is thus presented in his late prose as ‘post-apocalyptic’: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in the past when things went wrong [3], but that fateful turn has undeniably taken place and wrought grave spiritual change. Thus do we hear the death knells of our civilization, one growing increasingly hostile to individuals and erecting a cult of violence.

I hope to achieve two aims in this study. Firstly, I hope to show ‘Grave New World’, the imaginary territory Ballard describes in his books, which is a combination of the turn-of-the-millennium world, intertextual allusions to both fiction and non-fiction, and Ballard’s projections for the near future with its sociological idiosyncrasies. I would like to prove that irrespectively of the literary conventions Ballard applies in a given text (science fiction, speculative fiction, detective story, thriller, war novel or any other), he charts the very same territory and remains throughout primarily interested in the reaction of the human mind to the post-World War II reality which is the common denominator of his diverse obsessions. Secondly, I would like to shed some light on the spiritual condition and social problems of contemporary Western civilization as seen by its ever so inquisitive member. [4]

‘Continuously creating his own image’: J.G. Ballard self-portrait, double exposure, 1950 (photo via RE/Search Publications).

My technique in approaching Ballard is mostly that of textual analysis and close readings of passages of his texts that best show his exuberant stylistics; sometimes I also point out his references to literary and cultural theories. As far as said theories are concerned, I shall follow Ballard’s own readings. He very often alludes to critical schools and makes his characters discuss fashionable notions and ideas. Therefore, I will refer to the same sources: mostly psychoanalysts (many Ballardian characters are psychiatrists), but also historians and recent cultural theorists.

There are two problems with discussing Ballard’s fiction, and they need be dealt with at the very beginning. The first concerns the generic classification of his books — the second is posed by Ballard’s continuous attempts at auto-creation. As far as classification goes, the critics in different decades have described Ballard as a science fiction writer, a mainstream writer, a surrealist, a representative of the avant-garde, and an author who defies any classifications. To portray these controversies, in the next part of this Introduction (‘The Critical Response to J.G. Ballard’) I will briefly present the most important critical approaches to Ballard, at the same time showing how his oeuvre alludes to many different literary conventions. As for myself, I am not going to deal with this problem and give my opinion about, for example, the precise moment when Ballard left science fiction behind and started writing ‘serious’ books. Rather, I will discuss all his works on the same plane: moreover, I will not follow the chronology of Ballard’s long and generically diverse literary career, opting instead to treat all of his oeuvre synchronically, as descriptions of different vistas of his ‘Grave New World’. To provide the reader with relevant dates and the order of Ballard’s works I have included a calendar of his life and career at the end of this thesis (Appendix II).

In the last part of this Introduction (‘J.G. Ballard’s Auto-creation) I will deal with the second problem the Ballardian critic has to face. Over the fifty years of his career Ballard was continuously creating his own image. His quasi-autobiographies, numerous articles and memories present a persona or rather a number of personas that he constructed in different moments of his life. Such a self-fashioning should not be mistaken with any kind of ‘historical truth’ and in a study concerned with the intellectual history of the twentieth century it is important not to take the fictitious ‘James Ballard’ for a person who really witnessed the war in Asia and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Therefore, I will briefly discuss the images Ballard constructed in different decades of the last century and later, in the main body of my thesis, I will, to quote D.H. Lawrence, ‘trust the tale not the teller’ and try to avoid the auto-creation fallacies.

In my first chapter, before the focused discussion of Ballard’s own oeuvre, I will succinctly present those thinkers who are most important to the understanding of his works. Such a spiritual map of the (mainly) twentieth century as sketched by following Ballard’s favourite philosophers and scientists will help to place his fiction in the proper intellectual perspective, as his works are deeply informed by theories that, from differing points of view, discuss the alarming state of our civilization. This chapter does not aim to present on its but few pages a grand critique of the century and the path our world is taking (as that, of course, lies far beyond the scope of the present study). Rather, I will confine myself to pointing out those books and essays that Ballard directly refers to. This chapter will therefore give a theoretical frame to the subsequent discussion and will allow me to avoid repetitive summaries of cultural theories in the rest of the study. Thus, in the following chapters I will refer back to this theoretical frame numerous times, owing to the fact that Ballard often alludes to the very same set of critical essays and enters into intertextual discussions with their authors from changing vantage points.

J.G. Ballard: photo via RE/Search publications.

As far as my own approach to his fiction is concerned, I will start by discussing, in Chapter II, the war narratives: Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and some short stories devoted to both World War II and imaginary military conflicts of the future. These texts describe events which for Ballard are the very beginning of cultural decline, as it is after the war that Western civilization turned into ‘Grave New World’. Though these books play with the reader by giving the origins of events from Ballard’s other fictional works and might be treated as a conscious mythologizing of his life and career, they nevertheless do reveal the crux of Ballard’s historiosophy.

In the following chapters I try to map ‘Grave New World’ and chart its diverse territories. In Chapter III I show cityscapes in Ballard’s books and discuss contemporary urban civilization — the cause of psychological traumas. Chapter IV is devoted to mediascapes and the influence of modern communication technology on the way people live, think and dream. Life in a world full of highly developed technologies makes people indulge in escapist fantasies and thus Chapter V describes the mindscapes of contemporary Man: the end of the world fantasies, death-drive utopias, and wish-fulfilment catastrophic scenarios. Chapter VI, the final one, deals with the plexus of the contemporary world and the near future, picturing the decadent decline of Western wastelands: life in gated communities, secluded enclaves and luxurious resorts home to psychopathologies, deviations and terminal boredom enlivened only by acts of pointless violence.

In the autumn 2006, long after the first draft of this thesis had been completed, the newest of Ballard’s books, Kingdom Come, was published. Though it was too late to incorporate analysis of that novel into the main body of my work, I do discuss the novel in Appendix I and examine how it adds to the description of ‘Grave New World’. Therefore, September 2006 marks the close of my research and no books published later are discussed.

INTRODUCTION. 1 THE CRITICAL RESPONSE TO J.G. BALLARD

J.G. Ballard’s literary career started in the nineteen-fifties. His early stories were published in the popular magazines promoting a new, unique type of science fiction, one that differed from the pulp space fiction from America, which after the war flooded the British market. In the early sixties the need to reform the genre of science fiction and start a new thoroughly British artistic movement was all-pervasive. A small group of young writers, who later were dubbed the ‘New Wave’, looked for a periodical that would publish intellectual SF, or ‘speculative fiction’, as they insisted on calling it. Speculative fiction was to be a medium to discuss current social and cultural issues in an experimental, and often dramatic way.

Cover: New Worlds #179, Feb. 1968.

The periodical they finally found was New Worlds, a magazine published since 1946, but which in its long history had many times changed publishing houses and its artistic profile. In 1967 the post of editor-in-chief was given to Michael Moorcock, an ambitious young writer and a friend of Ballard — together they prepared a number of artistic manifestos defining speculative fiction and setting the goals for British avant-garde science fiction. The term ‘speculative fiction’ was soon abandoned, as the critics and columnists preferred to call the New Worlds group the ‘New Wave’, which is a literal translation of the French nouvelle vague. [5] Christopher Priest, a writer and a journalist, and Judith Merril, an influential US-born anthologist and columnist, popularized the phrase ‘New Wave’ among readers in Britain and the US.

Although the avant-garde tendencies in British science fiction are in fact older than the late-1960s term, and stories written by Ballard, Moorcock and Brian Aldiss a few years earlier are now subsumed under the ‘New Wave’ label. Peter Nicholls writes in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993):

By 1965, then, science fiction was ripe for change. In fact many of the so-called experiments of the period were not experiments at all, but merely an adoption of narrative strategies, and sometimes ironies that had long been familiar in the mainstream novel. In the event, some of the science fiction writers who felt they now had the freedom to experiment, especially Ballard, were to add something new to the protocols of prose fiction generally (Clute and Nicholls 1993: 866).

Therefore, from the very beginning of his literary career Ballard is considered an in-between writer oscillating between ‘low-brow’ and ‘high-brow’ literature. Sometimes he is called a postmodernist, sometimes an avant-garde author. [6] The critic who as early as the nineteen-sixties writes about him passionately and is partly responsible for his being dubbed an experimental ‘New Wave’ writer is Judith Merril. Merril is an author of a number of well-known disaster stories describing nuclear catastrophes, but only in the nineteen-fifties when she began editing anthologies did she become one of the most influential figures in American science fiction. Always experimental and eager to revise the clichéd standards of American pulp magazines, she swiftly became an advocate of the ‘New Wave’, and especially of Ballard. As a columnist in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she presented speculative fiction to American readers and discussed the books of the New Worlds writers.

New Worlds today is an altogether unique publication: and the astonishment of some of the stuffier intellectual circles in London when the Art Council announced an annual grant of 1800 pounds for a science fiction magazine… was probably no greater than the shock experienced by American fans attending the 1967 World Science Fiction Convention in New York when they had their first look at the transformed magazine of Speculative Fiction… The new magazine is quarto size, non-glossy… with cover art, interior illustrations and (increasingly) page design to match the most experimental of the fiction, and to suit the sophistication of Chris Finch’s articles on avant-garde art and graphics (Merril 1968: 344-345).

In 1968 Merril edited an anthology of the ‘New Wave’ writers: England Swings SF. Stories of Speculative Fiction. Apart from stories and poems Merril presents in this book her opinion on every writer in original fashion. England Swings SF tries to match the ‘New Wave’ fiction in graphic experiments and narrative strategies. The very beginning of the anthology resembles an avant-garde poem:

You have never read a book like this before, and the next time you read one anything like it, it won’t be much like it at all.

It’s an action-photo, a record of process-in-change,
a look through the perspex porthole at the
momentarily stilled bodies in a scout ship boosting
fast, and heading out of sight into the multiplex mystery of inner/outer space.

I can’t tell you where they are going, but
maybe that’s why I keep wanting to read what they write. The next time someone assembles the work of the writers in this … well, ‘school’ is too formal
and ‘movement’ sounds pretentious… (ibid.: 9-10).

The anthology contains works of over twenty young and ambitious writers — Ballard is the only one who has three of his stories reprinted: the other authors boast but one. Given the prominent position of ‘guru of British avant-garde’, he is presented to American readers (the anthology was meant to introduce the new literary fashion in America) as an often misunderstood, intellectually challenging writer. Merril chooses the newest stories, ones which are written is the present tense and use the collage technique: images, bits and pieces of commercials, psychiatric studies and TV newsreels are juxtaposed to show the prevailing violence of the contemporary mediascape.

Merril also decides to characterize Ballard (and other writers) in collages. Her introductions to stories are combinations of different texts cut into pieces and glued together. According to Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), collage technique challenges the readers expectation of a synthetic, singular meaning. Diverse passages, graphically rearranged quotes of interviews, reviews and Merril’s own opinions do not give a unified picture but rather show, at least in the case of Ballard, discussions and quarrels concerning his person and his place in the British literary world.

One can only hope that for Ballard too the worst misunderstanding is over, so that he will be free to create in a more intelligent atmosphere.

And so it was … in England, where the earlier work had finally been digested.

Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content; and I think in exactly the same way, today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent contents.

And his sponsorship of the Ambit contest for the best prose or poetry written under the influence of drugs (ibid: 104-105).

Though Merril’s style is far from critical exactness [7] (she does not give the sources of the texts used in her collages, not all sentences are complete), it very well reflects the atmosphere of the 1960s discussions of the ‘New Wave’ and Ballard’s place in it. Juxtaposed with other experimental writers he is discussed within the science fiction movement, with the strong suggestion that his literary goal was to uplift, renew and meliorate science fiction. Ballard at that time was praised not only by science fiction critics [8] — and the general tone of his reviewers is similar to Merril’s: this writer is the best and the most interesting of the speculative fiction writers.

Gradually, speculative fiction writers were either absorbed by the literary mainstream or stopped writing experimental prose and turned to pulp fiction. Harlan Ellison, the editor of an influential American anthology of speculative fiction, Dangerous Visions, complains in his Introduction that: ‘despite the new interest in speculative fiction by the mainstream, despite the enlarged and variant styles of the new writers, despite the enormity and expansion of topics open to these writers, despite what is outwardly a booming, healthy market, there is a constricting narrowness of mind on the part of many editors in the field!’ (Ellison 1983: XXIII). In his attempt to revive this ambitious kind of popular fiction, Ellison decided to create an anthology ‘intended as a canvas for new writing styles, bold departures, unpopular thoughts’ (ibid., XXVIII). And although he did not manage to ‘save’ speculative fiction, his Dangerous Visions remain an important book in the history of science fiction.

Ellison is a very intrusive anthologist: to every one of the thirty-two stories in the book he writes a separate introduction and epilogue, wherein he gives his opinions, suggestions and remarks concerning both the meaning of the story and its author. It is interesting to see how he describes J.G. Ballard, whom he presents to his American readers as a leader of the young English writers. Indeed, it is Ballard’s Englishness, his upper-middle-class origins and colonial past that appeal to Ellison the most, while he in fact cannot define Ballard’s literary style:

Yet in totality [Ballard's books] present a kind of enriched literacy, a darker yet somehow clearer — perhaps the word is ‘poignant’ — approach to the materials of speculative writing. There is a flavour of surrealism to Ballard’s writing. No, it’s not that, either. It is, in some ways, serene, as oriental philosophy is serene. Resigned yet vital. There appears to be a superimposed reality that covers the underlying pure fantasy of Ballardian conception (ibid., 459).

I am quoting Ellison to show how Ballard was received in the United States, for the American market is the most important (if not hegemonic) as far as science fiction goes. Ellison completed his anthology in the late 1960s, in the last days of the British ‘New Wave’ in science fiction. James Gunn, the editor of probably the most important single anthology/history of science fiction ever written, the multi-volumed The Road to Science Fiction, produced his book in the following decade. At that time in the US nobody well remembered what the ‘New Wave’ was about. So, while presenting Ballard and his story ‘The Terminal Beach’ to his readers, Gunn had to lecture on this movement. He discusses it from the perspective of America in the late 1970s, treating it as a very remote phenomenon. He calls Ballard the leader and guru of the New Worlds group, compares his enigmatic symbolic style to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and explains the nihilism of his writing by claiming that Ballard wrote against Americans in Vietnam, about drugs, the Beatles, pop-art, pop-music, political assassinations and terrorism. And this is probably how Ballard is read by fans of science fiction to this day.

Although Ballard’s career stretched well beyond the ‘New Wave’ movement, which ended by the early nineteen-seventies, his early fiction is often discussed in the context of its poetics. The ambitious artistic programme of the movement and the fact that many of its representatives became well-known and important writers [9] attracted the attention of literary critics. One of the first scholars to study the output of the group was Colin Greenland, who in the late 1970s was a postgraduate student at Oxford. A great fan of New Worlds and science fiction in general, he dreamt of writing serious criticism about this literary genre, which at the time was considered too ‘low-brow’ to study. [10] Tom Shippey [11], then Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, an author of criticism about J.R.R. Tolkien and a contributor to Patric Parrinder’s critical anthology Science Fiction. A Critical Guide agreed to supervise Greenland’s work.

Finally, in 1980 a thesis entitled The Entropy Exhibition. Michael Moorcock and the British ‘New Wave’ in Science Fiction was accepted for a doctorate in English Literature at the University of Oxford. Greenland, thanks to a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain, reworked his thesis and in 1983 a book of the same title was publish. The Entropy Exhibition is a superb criticism of science fiction, as Greenland shows the literary output of the ‘New Wave’ in the context of cultural and artistic life in the nineteen-sixties. And although only one chapter is devoted exclusively to Ballard, it remains to this day an important item in Ballardian criticism.

Greenland describes the social situation in the sixties, the emergence of youth culture, the influence of the Space Race [12] on popular imagination, the Vietnam War and the stormy history of New Worlds — a magazine that tried to reflect current cultural phenomena. Additionally, he inserts in his book three monographic essay-chapters presenting the works of Ballard, Aldiss and Moorcock.

As far as Ballard’s output is concerned, Greenland discusses his early disaster novels and some of the stories he wrote in the fifties and sixties. The books High-Rise and Concrete Island (written in the seventies) are but mentioned, and Ballard’s later works are of course absent from the study. His general approach to both Ballard and the ‘New Wave’ is to read their output as a new kind of fiction growing out of traditional science fiction and characterized by its fascination with entropy: the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. This fiction is in intimate connection with other cultural experiments of the epoch. Ballard, according to Greenland, is first of all a masterful stylist whose metaphors and allusions recreate the pessimistic attitude of the times and show a Universe doomed to death, one already frozen in its final stage. Ballard’s early prose is described as pictorial and portrayed in the context of visual arts — Pablo Picasso, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dali, René Magritte — Greenland points to colours, shades and figures borrowed by Ballard from concrete paintings.

Greenland also proves to what extent Ballard is indebted to Surrealism as far as his language is concerned, the poetic character of his early prose being an effect of a highly associative style:

The Surrealist techniques that Ballard has used involve deliberate dissociations and mystifications. The object is taken from its usual context and dismantled, or put in a new context, or confused with other objects. But the result of the process is not mere nonsense, but a revaluation. The elements acquire new significance from the reorganisation, so that we sense more about the object than we knew or felt before. Surrealism can thus be said to have both a synthetic and an analytic aspect; it consists not only of inspiration, but also of inquiry. This duality Ballard has inherited (Greenland 1983: 104).

LEFT: J.G. Ballard: Illustration by Carol Gregory, from J.G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years (eds. James Goddard & David Pringle).

Such a characterization of Ballard’s early style strikes as being very apt, as it accounts for Ballard’s fascinations with Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry and André Breton, numerous visual intertextual allusions in his stories, as well as for Ballard’s obsessive returns to the same or similar figures of speech. What Ballard and the Surrealists surely have in common is the belief that an apocalypse had already taken place, both in the intellectual sphere and in daily life. Ballard’s prose shows the contemporary world abundant in fictions whose only connotations are the fantasies of their authors. Our environment is fragmented and coded, the popular imagery of posters and commercials needs deciphering — hence, Ballard’s indebtedness to semiology and Roland Barthes. In other words, we live in the nightmarish world of the Surrealists.

Greenland describes Ballard’s style and his specific figures of speech in an attempt to show why Ballardian prose is immediately recognizable and ‘unmistakable’. He analyzes Ballard’s habit of introducing a story with a stylized tableau and his conscious use of what he calls ‘pseudo-simile, one in which there is no discoverable parity between the terms. Ballard’s version of it employs a literary sleight commonly used by ironists: he keeps the relation but blurs the distinction, so that the two halves of the simile, the actual and the virtual, can be swapped over’ (ibid.: 103).

Greenland’s book is still, after over twenty years, the best critical analysis of the ‘New Wave’ movement, for among other reasons because it allows us to look at Ballard’s early works from the perspective of the literary life in England at that time. It shows Ballard’s involvement in the editing of New Worlds, his views on art and civilization in the 1960s, and his ambiguous position on the literary scene. Greenland (just like Merril) is very much interested in categories such as science fiction, mainstream literature, modernist writing, and the avant-garde. He shows the difficulties in pigeonholing Ballard and presents diverse opinions about how to classify his works. His major achievement as far as critical appraisal of Ballard’s fiction goes is the discussion of his style in the context of the Surrealists: painters and poets alike.

In the nineteen-seventies many writers and critics discovered Ballard and came to highly prize his unique style and remarkable literary achievements. Among them were Kingsley Amis (a great advocate of ‘New Wave’ prose), Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Susan Sontag and William S. Burroughs. They wrote reviews and introductions, but no monograph was published till the end of the decade [13]. Ultimately, David Pringle decided to work on a serious study of Ballard and in 1979 he published Earth is the Alien Planet. J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare, a brief (sixty-one page) but important monograph. His ambition in the book is to present Ballard’s literary output to both science fiction fans and the general reading public. Moreover, Pringle offers them a key to Ballard: he defines the place Ballard has on the market, divides his career into periods and classifies Ballardian characters and motifs.

Pringle starts by comparing Ballard to Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, who also started their careers as science fiction writers, but subsequently transcended that category. Pringle describes Ballard as being less acclaimed, but equally worthy of being published ‘without the SF label’ (Pringle 1979: 3). He pins Ballard’s lack of popularity on the fact that, unlike Bradbury and Vonnegut, he does not write for big and glossy magazines such as Playboy, but for the ambitious low-circulation press. This ‘courting of the avant-garde’ (ibid.: 3) wins him a new but limited audience. Nevertheless, Pringle is sure that in the future Ballard will be fully appreciated and the book ends in a prophesy:

Nevertheless, Ballard’s reputation will grow in the decades to come, and he is likely to become recognized as by far and away the most important literary figure associated with the field of science fiction. More than that: he will be seen as one of the major imaginative writers of the second half of the 20th century — an author for our times, and for the future (ibid.: 61).

J.G. Ballard: photo by Eamonn McCabe.

The division of Ballard’s career into periods is also based on the genre of criticism. Here Pringle distinguished an early ‘romantic’ stage, when Ballard published in the science fiction press stories concerned with the inner landscapes of characters’ minds, and the post-science fiction period. It was then that Ballard shifted his interests to outer landscapes, abandoned science fiction conventions and embraced the avant-garde and literary periodicals. This is a ‘dark’ period of formal experiments and of bitter criticism of the violence intrinsic to contemporary life. Pringle also suggests that Ballard is at the beginning of yet another period, one of writing present-oriented fiction describing technological environments: ‘he has also made larger concession to social realism — he is trying to become more of a novelist‘ (ibid.: 50).

Pringle explains that last statement by saying that Ballard is trying to construct rounded characters, while in his early prose his characters are symbolic ‘figures in an inner landscape’ (ibid.: 51). He classifies these symbolic figures according to Jungian archetypes as the lamia, the jester and the king — and most Ballardian characters are demonstrated to belong to one of the categories. A similar symbolic key is used to deal with Ballardian themes (the categories are: Imprisonment [14], Flight, Time Must Have A Stop And Superannuation) and to classify his obsessively recurrent images [15]. Ballardian mythology is four-fold: Pringle distinguishes four groups of symbols representing mythical meanings of water, sand, concrete and crystal. Water stands for the past and the return to previous stages of evolution, sand and dryness are in the future of the human race when only the exhausted shell of the planet will remain. Further, concrete is the world of the present day — the urban culture, while crystal, like a Jungian mandala represents oneness with the Universe.

Generally speaking, Pringle’s book represents Jungian criticism (though once he very rightly remarks, albeit in passing, that Ballard’s references to Jung and Freud are mixed), and as such is it usually quoted. Pringle is also the first critic to mention Ballard’s biography in the context of his fiction and to announce Ballard’s affiliation to the avant-garde. In the following years Pringle remained Ballard’s major critic, but more and more scholars interested in both science fiction and mainstream literature began to approach Ballard’s books, often trying to ascribe his writing to some larger cultural frame. In The Hidden Script (1985), for example, David Punter discusses Ballard’s fiction in the section ‘Narratives and the Unconscious’, showing (in reference to psychoanalytic theories) the interrelation of the internal and the external spheres in his fiction.

The short chapter ‘J.G. Ballard: alone among the murder machines’ is an excellent analysis of the metaphoric space Ballardian characters inhabit (e.g., in Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise, Concrete Island, Hello America and The Unlimited Dream Company). This territory is nightmarish and ruled by man-made machines, ‘the lurking engines of destruction which keep us pinned down’ (Punter 1985: 11), and people strive to regain a spiritual hold on objects, but they are in fact helpless victims of their own psychopathologies. Surrounded by technology and advanced communication systems, Man loses the ability of expression: ‘the areas of language already colonised by the public media too developed to allow for more than the slightest insertion of a discourse of individual desire’ (ibid.: 10). Punter goes on to define Ballard’s oeuvre in relation to contemporary culture and, although his analysis was written a quarter of a century ago, it is still very illuminating:

Where character is concerned, Ballard is one of the few writers who can be sensibly termed post-structuralist: the long tradition of enclosed and unitary subjectivity comes to mean less and less to him as he explores the ways in which a person is increasingly controlled by landscape and machine; increasingly becomes a point of intersection for overloaded scripts and processes which have effectively concealed their distant origins in human agency (ibid.: 9).

In Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (1981), edited by Curtis C. Smith, a lexicon of those authors whose work goes beyond realism (even if they usually are not referred to as science fiction writers), the entry ‘J.G. Ballard’ presents him as an original and distinctive writer whose style is described as idiosyncratic ‘as a signature’ and shaped by the painter’s eye of the author. [16] The stress falls on Ballard’s intellectual fascinations: ‘masterpieces of literature (from Homer and the Bible through Shakespeare to Coleridge and Melville) and the arts (from Bosch to Dali and Leonor Fini)’ (Smith 1981: 31). His early fiction is called romantic and exuberant science fiction rich in intertextual allusions, where bizarre landscapes ‘reflect and amplify the inner and mutual conflicts of glamorous lamias and their suicidal wooers, in a baroque symphony of art, love, and death’ (ibid.: 31). 1966 is given as the turning point after which Ballard abandons science fiction and starts to describe the contemporary world and to criticize its technology, violence and perverted entertainment. Such a present is just a fossil of the future, and his interest in science fiction gives Ballard an ability to look at social life in a detached, scientific way. Beyond that, Ballard’s style changes abruptly: all exuberance is gone and instead we read about people like us, with popular names, living in real cities and made to cope with an inhuman urban existence.

It is interesting to juxtapose this entry with a later one hailing from the prestigious The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993, revised 1999), edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. ‘J.G. Ballard’ by David Pringle is a long entry and, for the first time, the author is presented not primarily as a science fiction writer (despite the very character of this Encyclopedia). Indeed, stress falls on those aspects of Ballard’s output which transgress the standards of the genre. Even the earliest stories are shown as eschewing traditional science fiction themes and instead concentrating on ‘near-future decadence and disaster’. We learn that Ballard was severely criticized by fans as a pessimist and a life-hater, that the science fiction world wrote him off, and that he never won a single science fiction award. Pringle also describes the hostility with which editors treated his later prose (the entire Doubleday edition of Atrocity Exhibition was printed only to be pulped just before publication) because he used people such as Ronald Reagan, the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe as characters. Pringle ends by presenting Ballard’s psychological war novels and by briefly characterizing his biography — these are the beginnings of the legend of J.G. Ballard, his war and the impact it had on his imagination. Pringle concludes:

J.G. Ballard: photo by David Levenson.

Although most of his longer work of the past decade has been outside the field, the originality and appropriateness of his vision continue to ensure JGB’s standing as one of the most important writers ever to have emerged from sf (Clute and Nicholls 1993: 85).

When in 1994 Simulacra and Simulations (1981) by Jean Baudrillard was translated into English, the prose of J.G. Ballard found a new and influential advocate. In a chapter devoted to Ballard’s Crash (which had previously been translated and reprinted in Science Fiction Studies) Baudrillard calls Ballard’s book one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature, one which shows the world of today as it really is, the simulated, unreal projection of mass culture and sophisticated hi-tech. Science fictionalizes reality, the world of cyber-technology is by nature fictitious and Ballard’s prose is a rare example of the conscious exposure of the simulacra-ridden mediascape.

Generally, in the late nineteen-eighties [17] the status of ambitious science fiction changed. On the one hand some of the very good science fiction writers elevated the genre to the status of intellectually provoking, erudite reading, yet on the other hand many postmodernist writers began to apply science fiction conventions. Used as sophisticated literary trope, science fiction was no longer associated solely with an adolescent male audience and acquired the ambiguous status of ‘a game with the reader’ or ‘a play with a convention’. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’ The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (1997) by Roger Luckhurst, the best critical book on Ballard to date, is devoted to the role Ballard’s output plays in the contemporary discussions about literary genres. Luckhurst’s major thesis is that Ballard evades any and all classifications and that, moreover, his writing produces an effect of unease just because it exposes the binary, opposition-based categories we apply when reading. Ballard’s books (especially Crash and Atrocity Exhibition; other works are either but mentioned or discussed in brief subchapters) are for Luckhurst a pretext to expose contemporary reading protocols defining what is post-modern, what is modern, what is science fiction and what is avant-garde.

Luckhurst begins by showing Ballard as a fringe writer living literally in the suburbs of London and figuratively outside literary London and outside the Academia of English studies (a little like Ian Sinclair and, once, Angela Carter). His key to Ballard is the notion of la brisure (according to deconstruction, this is the point in any structural system that makes the working of the system at once possible and impossible), and in his analyses he most often refers to Derrida [18]. The choice of deconstruction as his approach is dictated by Ballard’s paradoxical proliferation in recent criticism:

The mainstream post-war novelist of increasing import; the aberrant foreign body within science fiction; the belated voice of a science fiction modernism; the anticipatory or timely voice of a paradigmatic postmodernism; the avant-garde writer of extreme experimental fictions; the prophet of the perversity of the contemporary world (Luckhurst 1997: xii).

Deconstruction exposes binary oppositions we constantly use while thinking and thus allows Luckhurst to subvert generic codes and frames of recognition that allow readability, and to ‘speak from a structurally similar space of the between‘ (ibid.: xiii). Such a critical standpoint sometimes makes his text a little enigmatic and focused not on Ballard’s output but on the reader’s (and critic’s) response to it. Nevertheless, Luckhurst’s study is very erudite, well grounded and full of insights into Ballard, the most valuable of which is the observation that Ballard’s text anticipates its interpretations. ‘His work at once constantly activates theoretical models, but it is also awkward, didactic, and overtheorized, tending to evade or supersede the theories meant to ‘explain’ it’ (ibid.: xvii).

Luckhurst proves his thesis on Ballard’s fiction as exposing reading conventions by discussing in subsequent chapters the disaster story convention, surrealist writing, postcolonial writing, and theories of avant-garde and of contemporary reality as simulation. In each case Ballard’s books are shown as both transgressing genres and subverting the oppositions they are based on. The conclusion is, expectedly, that Ballard’s ‘oeuvre will not give up its irreducible core’ (ibid.: xix), which very well sums up over forty years of critical discussion of Ballard’s place on the twentieth-century literary map.

Nowadays Ballard is recognized as a major contemporary English novelist by the critical establishment and he is usually referred to as an author writing across high and low, literary and popular paradigms. His website page in the Internet, www.jgballard.com, is frequently visited by numerous fans from all over the world and apart from publicity material — book covers, offers, etc., one can find links there to numerous texts originally written for various newspapers and magazines, forming a complex body of inter-related discourses to do with Ballard and his career. A closer look at the website shows that the more ambitious texts might be categorized into four groups: reviews of novels, longer articles summarizing Ballard’s oeuvre, interviews, and Ballard’s own press articles dealing with issues such as war in Iraq, terrorism, urban architecture and consumerism. [19]

Photographer unknown. Details welcome.

Some of the reviews offer interesting insights into Ballard’s prose. For example, Chris Hall in ‘Future Shock’ discusses Crash in a text written just after David Cronenberg made his film based on it and points out that the novel defamiliarizes the violence omnipresent in the Hollywood convention of family films [20]. ‘White Line Fever’, by David B. Huingstone, shows that Cocaine Nights is an exposition of our cultural unconscious, while Marcos Moure in ‘Desert Island Disaster’ compares Rushing to Paradise to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It is also worth mentioning two reviews by L. J. Hurst: ‘The Dark Side of the Equinox’, which interprets The Crystal World as a metaphysical thriller, and ‘Through the Crash Barrier’, which is a Shakespearean reading of Concrete Island.

To give samples of longer presentations of Ballard’s literary output, Richard Behrens’s ‘J.G. Ballard’ concentrates on surrealism in his writing and Gary Evans in ‘J.G. Ballard: a Crash Course in the Future’ analyzes the future psychology of Ballardian characters. The most comprehensive in this category of texts is Roger Bazzeto’s ‘J.G. Ballard L’écrivain, auter de Science-Fiction ‘, an academic account of Ballard’s prose comparing Ballard to Andy Warhol. Bazzeto claims that the world in Ballard’s novels is three-fold: mythologies of media legends, everyday life in post-modern society, and urban nightmares.

The most interesting articles are perhaps interviews with Ballard, who often speaks about contemporary phenomena as reflected in his novels. In ‘Flight and Imagination’ he shares with Chris Hall his opinions on the relation of late capitalism, psychopathology and violence, and in ‘Not a Literary Man’ (by Marcos Moure) he discusses the decline of science fiction. To David Gale’s ‘Grave New World. Interview with J.G. Ballard’ I am indebted for the title of my thesis; in this very revealing interview Ballard explains what his radical vision of the future is.

Even a short look at these texts about and by Ballard shows that his name is no longer associated with ‘fringe’ or ‘marginal’ literary life, but is a part of the legitimate centre — he has found his way into the histories of contemporary literature. Currently a number of theses devoted to Ballard are being written at English universities by doctorate students, some of whom, like Sam Francis from the University of Leeds, publish their papers in international reviews of science fiction. A good example of critical evaluation of Ballard is a monograph published in the prestigious British Council-sponsored series Writers and Their Work, which is meant to briefly present the most important British authors to the reading public. J.G. Ballard (1998) by Michel Delville is a very good, concise account of all his most important works. Arranged in chronological order, it retraces subsequent stages in Ballard’s career and attempts to show this diverse oeuvre as an example of artistic evolution. Delville is aware that critical assessment of Ballard is very heterogeneous:

At least three J.G. Ballards have so far been championed in critical studies and literary histories: the science fiction writer, famous for his disaster novels and stories of entropic dissolution; and admirer of William S. Burroughs and author of scandalous tales remarkable for their sexual frankness and eccentric violence; and the Booker Prize nominee, whose account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai in Empire of the Sun was published to great acclaim in 1984 (Delville 1998: 1).

Delville is aware of the temptation to draw a clear-cut line between Ballard’s ambitious popular fiction and his mainstream novels. He is also careful not to reduce Ballard to a case of the prolonged artistic maturation of a science fiction writer who finally manages to disentangle himself from the immature genre. Instead he treats Ballard’s obsessive and imaginary writing as a means to reflect the violent paradoxes of life in the twentieth century that escape less anxious discourses.

In 2005 another monograph under the same title, J.G. Ballard, was published in the new series ‘Contemporary British Novelists’ by the Manchester University Press. Written by Andrzej Gasiorek, this book (second in the series, after Aaron Kelly’s Irvine Welsh) is a presentation of Ballard’s oeuvre and a critical response to it. Like the whole series, it aims at disclosing controversies in contemporary literary life and theory. Just like Luckhurst, he reads Ballard in the context of surrealism, Pop Art and science fiction. Gasiorek’s book is very recent and marks the growing critical interest in Ballard’s writing. He shows Ballard’s output as ‘a symbolic rejection of the familiar heritage’ (Gasiorek 2005: 2), writing against the tradition, against ‘Englishness’, against ‘a socially rooted fiction based on psychological realism’ (ibid.: 3), and against legitimate traditional literary genres.

The way the above critics approach Ballard seems to me very fair and it is quite similar to my own critical standpoint (I side especially with David Punter and Michel Delville). But as there have been so many exhaustive studies devoted to assimilating Ballard to generic categories (or abolishing the notion of genre fiction), I would rather refrain from repeating their arguments, and discuss what to my knowledge has not yet been discussed — the picture of The Decline of the West seen from the perspective of both his fiction as a whole and that of theorists of civilization. Before embarking on that intellectual voyage, we need first look at the way Ballard constructs his own persona.

..:: Part Two is now online.

Previously on Ballardian:
+ Review: Grave New World, by Rick McGrath

ENDNOTES

[1] This phrase comes from an interview Ballard gave to David Gale: ‘Grave New World. Interview with J.G. Ballard’, BBC Radio 3, 10 November 1998 ( www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006).

[2] As late as in 2004 in an appendix to his novel Millennium People J.G. Ballard gives Huxley’s Brave New World at the very top of the list of books he advises to read for those who have liked his novel (Ballard 2004: Appendix 16).

[3] For Ballard the plausible candidate is the invention and use of the nuclear bomb. For the first time in history the human race acquired the means to realize its latent propensity for self-destruction. Men have always been violent creatures unconsciously dreaming of death and war, something which culture has tried to cover up for thousands of years. Once the true human nature was revealed, there is no turning back and human destiny — destruction for internal reasons — is going to happen sooner or later.

[4] In one of Freud’s essays that Ballard often quotes, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud calls human civilization a mistake. Ballard’s fiction is devoted to the descriptions of this mistake.

[5] An experimental artistic movement in the French cinema associated with the films of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

[6] It may be interesting to note that in 1993 Ballard wrote a review of this Encyclopedia. Published in the Daily Telegraph, that article was re-printed in Ballard’s collection of journalism, A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Ballard speaks in favour of the Encyclopedia and science fiction in general, noticing that in the second part of the 20th century more and more mainstream writers (such as Angela Carter, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing and Kingsley Amis) turn to science fiction, which is the true folk literature of the century, with ‘folk literature’s hotline to the unconscious’ (Ballard 1997b: 193). Science fiction has the power to design the future, and to tell us what life might be like in some years’ time. He also writes that in the mid-century, after the Moon Landing and during the space race, everybody was interested in the future and the conquest of space and in trying to imagine what the year 2000 would bring, while at the real end of the Millennium People forget all about that. Certain crazy millenarian cults are treated in the same way, such as fitness fanatics, or animal-rights activists and New Agers — and they in fact deserve no better, which is a telling sign of our spiritual deterioration.

[7] As one can see in the quote above, Merril’s technique is to cut into pieces different texts and mix the cuttings irrespectively of syntax., the only differentiation between them is in the shape of print (I preserve Merril’s bolds and margins to show how difficult it is to read her).

[8] In 1973 Brian Aldiss published Billion Year Spree, a history of science fiction. In the last chapter, devoted to the newest phenomena in the field, Ballard is described in the following way: ‘His ferocious intelligence, his wit, his cantankerousness, and, in particular, his extraordinary rendering of the perverse pleasures of today’s paranoia, make him one of the grand magicians of modern fiction. His is an uncertain spell, but it spreads; far beyond the stockades of ordinary science fiction’ (Aldiss 1973: 343).

[9] Ballard is the most prominent among them, but there are many others, for example: Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, D.M. Thomas.

[10] Greenland is now a prominent science fiction scholar and an author of highly regarded fantastic books.

[11] Many years later Shippey remembers how science fiction critics were treated in the 1960s and 1970s by Academia: ‘A further way of putting this is to say that during my science fiction ‘lifetime’ (1958 to now) being a science fiction reader was rather like being gay. In both cases, one could say, drawing out the similarities: *there was a definite pressure, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, not to admit the fact; *there were social penalties if you did; *you got used to hiding the fact’ (Slusser and Westfall 2002: 8). Note: Volumes of criticism containing the essays, papers, and interviews which are quoted in the text of the present study are identified in the footnotes and then listed in the biography in alphabetic order under the name of the editor. The same is true for the prefaces and introductions which precede books written by some other author: in the footnotes the edition is identified and listed in the biography under the name of the author.

[12] Disappointed by the space programme and disinterested in conquering the Universe, the ‘New Wave’ writers produced anti-space fiction and were much more interested in the inner space of the human psyche.

[13] In 1973 David Pringle, a scholar specializing in writers associated with the field of science fiction, together with James Goddard edited J.G. Ballard — the First Twenty Years, a book which is not a monograph but a collection of texts consisting almost entirely of previously-published material by notable figures.

[14] Pringle is the first to explain Ballard’s obsession with imprisonment by his personal experience of the three years spent in the Japanese prison camp. Such explanations in the nineteen-eighties became critical cliché.

[15] Pringle enumerates typically ‘Ballardian’ images: ‘concrete weapon-ranges, dead fish, abandoned airfields, radio telescopes, crashed space-capsules, sand-dunes, empty cities, sand reefs, half-submerged buildings, helicopters, crocodiles, open-air cinema screens, jewelled insects, advertising hoardings, white hotels, beaches, fossils, broken juke-boxes, crystals, lizards, multi-storey car-parks, dry lake-beds, medical laboratories, drained swamps, motorway flyovers, stranded ships, broken Coke bottles, vegetation, high-rise buildings, predatory birds and low-flying aircraft’ (Pringle 1979: 16). This list is highly insightful; indeed, Pringle succeeds in pinpointing what the critics all vaguely describe as Ballard’s unmistakable style.

[16] The entry is written by George W. Barlow and in its bibliography all critical essays are by David Pringle. Currently (summer 2006) Pringle is preparing a new edition of J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, which is going to be very important to every Ballard scholar.

[17] In 1983 Ballard was contacted by V. Vale and the rest of RE/Search group, avant-garde publishers from San Francisco who became advocates of Ballard in the USA. In 1984 a special Ballard issue of their magazine RE/Search was published. In the following years they also re-published other of Ballard’s works in America. For instance, RE/Search published an annotated version of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard wrote commentaries to each chapter of this difficult but very important book. In recent years they published two important Ballardiana: J. G. Ballard Quotes and J.G. Ballard Conversations. The first is a collection of one-line aphorisms taken from Ballard’s books, the latter is a compilation of interviews given by him to different journalists (mostly from the RE/Search group).

[18] Jacques Derrida has the largest number of references (of course after Ballard) in the index and the bibliography.

[19] A good example of such an article is ‘Going Somewhere?’ (www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006). Ballard writes about the role airports have in contemporary life and city architecture. Himself an inhabitant of Shepperton, a distant London suburb near the London airport, he describes the unreal landscape of post-modern concourses and by-ways in his neighbourhood and then generalizes and writes about tourism, the cosmopolitanism of the affluent West and aircraft. This short text is therefore informed by subjects recurrent in his prose: futuristic enclaves, a nation of people in the air, and global culture.

[20] For all Internet sources in the following text www.jgballard.com, on: 20 August 2006.

Interview by Simon Sellars

Cousin Silas is a producer of dark-ambient soundscapes. He has five albums to his name and a few EPs, spiking the vein of glacial electronica. His work evokes Edward Artemiev and Brian Eno. In fact, for afficionados drawing inspiration from Eno’s most influential ambient works (Music for Airports, say, through to Thursday Afternoon), pleasure may very well be derived from the work of Silas. These textured pieces can be gently iterative, building ambience and atmosphere systematically; they can be as tenuous as ectoplasm, barely there; and they can be dramatically reductive, sloughing layers to reveal roiling depths beneath, echo sounding in waves of sound.

I spoke to Cousin Silas about Ballard, Lovecraft, Forteana, Moorcock, Eno, Tarkovsky — all the essentials.

Simon Sellars

SS: What inspired you to create two volumes of Ballard Landscapes?

CS: I’ve read a lot of fiction over the years, mainly science fiction. I began with Mike Moorcock’s Stealer of Souls, and then it was the odd name-dropping of Ballard that intrigued me. My first Ballard book was The Atrocity Exhibition, and I haven’t looked back, really. Out of all the authors I’ve read, Ballard is the only one who consistently hits the mark when it comes to events, situations and descriptions that I can relate to. A good example is his story, ‘Low Flying Aircraft’. When I read that, I think I was — still am — more impressed with the colours rather than the full picture. I was totally enmeshed — it didn’t take any imagination whatsoever to go deeper into the landscapes of that story, due to my childhood.

As a kid I spent a lot of time at my Grandma’s caravan. Being an only child, much of that time was spent playing on the dunes and beach. Out of season, the local Lido pool was always empty. There were always busy shipping lanes off the beach, mainly oil tankers, and on the way to and from the caravan we passed a place called RAF Binbrook, an air force base which had been abandoned. Empty caravans and beach huts, disused coastal railways, the fog drifting in from Immingham — it made isolation a byword. Also, in the Colne Valley, a lot of the textile industry went into slow decline. As a result the valley became full of empty mills, stagnant canals and rusting equipment — all the Ballardian icons were there. Plus the M62 was being built around the time I began to take notice of things happening off my street!

The short answer is that there’s something that inspires me in almost every paragraph of Ballard, let alone the chapters or novels, and the hard part was making a conscious decision to stop (maybe) at two volumes.

SS: Why not ‘Lovecraft landscapes’, after another of your literary influences?

CS: Lovecraft can’t be read quite the same. Sure, there’s the odd story that contains some marvellous moods — for example, his description of Innsmouth, or the landscapes he describes in ‘Dagon’ or ‘Dunwich’. Damn, those things inspire some amazing images. But a lot of Lovecraft’s imagery has dated — well, it’s his writing style — whereas Ballard’s is just so ‘now’, and yet so retro in some respects.

Lovecraft was a writer I really had to work at. A few years ago I used to write SF, and among the circle of friends and co-writers I became involved with, some were always going on about him. I eventually read a Lovecraft short-story collection and found it pretty damn good, and then I read At the Mountains of Madness, which took some time to get going. I think it was my third or fourth attempt. I kept saying that there simply MUST be something here… Anyway, I did eventually finish it and I really did enjoy it. Since then I’ve read more or less all he wrote. Some of it is terribly dated, but when Lovecraft was on form, he was simply astounding. Like Ballard, though, it was the geography and landscapes that inspired me, rather than the characters. Unlike Ballard, Lovecraft’s hit rate isn’t as high.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: Your online bio says, ‘When the occasion arose, he found that sound alchemy was more expressive and exploratory than writing.’ That’s intriguing — can you elaborate?

CS: As I said, I used to write a few years back, same as I still (try) and play the guitar, but I found that the Silas material was far more expressive and creative. With Silas there’s only one real limitation, and whilst it might sound pretentious, it’s imagination. With writing there are certain basic rules and with a guitar, to be good, you have to be absolutely brilliant. With ‘sound alchemy’, you don’t even have to know the first thing about writing music, or even reading music, only ‘does it sound ‘right’ for what you’re doing?’ If the answer is ‘yes’, go for it. Obviously having a basic understanding of chords and pitch with the guitar does help, but it’s not essential. Much like the punk ethos, get up and have a go!

SS: Was your SF writing influenced in any way by Ballard?

CS: Initially I was inspired by Moorcock, but gradually I drifted into Ballard territory. I did two stories that were directly influenced by J.G., one was called ‘The Song Of The Shapes’ and I can’t remember the title of the other one. ‘The Shapes’ was basically about floating sounds, like bubbles. The other story was basically an exodus of humans going back into the sea. And to my credit, they were both published. To be fair, though, it wasn’t ‘strictly’ Ballard, but the whole New Worlds thing. I loved the freedom and no-holds-barred that existed in the fiction. I haven’t really written fiction for years now. I find I don’t have the imagination for actually writing like I had, or the time.

SS: It’s no surprise to learn you also draw inspiration from Fortean events. Listening to your soundscapes is very much like tuning into some kind of spectral presence, or even something less metaphysical but still intensely dislocating, like voices drowned in static. There’s that steady hum in your work, and then something unsettling going on in the background, hustling in at the edge of consciousness.

CS: I’ve always had an unhealthy interest/curiosity in most things Fortean. I’m an avid reader and subscriber of Fortean Times, and I’ve even got two CDs worth of material currently being considered/reworked and going under the working title of The Fortean Project. There’s material there that’s been inspired by unidentified underwater objects, objects landing in remote woods, Borley Rectory, poltergeists, strange sounds, EVP, all the usual suspects. Also, ‘Necropolis Line’, the title track on my Earthrid CD, was inspired directly by an article in Fortean Times. There are quite a few other tracks of mine that have been inspired either directly or otherwise by Forteana.

I’m inspired by the strangeness, the mystery, and the downright weirdness of all these unexplained and odd happenings. I don’t especially enjoy reading about the whole world of Forteana, but I am interested in things like Electronic Voice Phenomena, strange moorland lights, places where ill feelings occur, anomalous artefacts. Some stuff I find a little tedious and totally uninspirational, like crop circles and UFO abductions. Even though I inherently know that some of the topics and situations that come under the slowly expanding umbrella of Forteana is bollocks, it can still create certain feelings. The inspiration is rather difficult to describe really — again, it’s moods and feelings and trying to convey these into sound. Naming these pieces does hopefully help the listener to ‘attune’ to what I’m aiming for.

SS: The presence of the paranormal in Ballard is something I’ve been taking an interest in.

CS: Oddly, I’d never really seen the parallel. Then again, thinking about it, these Fortean themes crop up in any number of SF stories, they’re not the exclusive domain of J.G. People out of place, or displaced momentarily in time, visions of Godlike entities, time travel, and even resurrection can be found all over the place. I suppose it’s because of the way these ‘ideas’ are presented. If they’re presented as fact, then it opens all kinds of doors for discussion, study and speculation. However, if they’re in fiction, then, well, it’s fiction! Perfect example is War of the Worlds. Anyone who’s read the book hasn’t rushed out to find if they’re there, or packed the family and belongings into a car and set of for the hills. And yet, when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre did a ‘play’, and produced it for radio in a documentary, on-the-spot news type thing, there was mass panic. Same story, different presentation.

SS: With the tracks on Ballard Landscapes 1 & 2, did you choose the title first and fit the music to suit, or did the music suggest a title?

CS: If I remember rightly, I think with the majority of the Ballard tracks I had an idea of the titles first. Some are direct, others less so. It was a case of trying to convey in sound what these images mean to me. Obviously the titles are like an aide memoir, and it could be argued that if ‘Rusting Gantry’ had been called, oh, I dunno, ‘Formless Clouds’, then the imagery and imagination of the listener would be taken somewhere else. I like to think that the titles and the pieces work well together.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: Judging from those titles, it’s clear you place equal importance on Ballard’s worth as a short story writer. There seems to be as much, if not more, reference to his shorts than his novels.

CS: Probably more. Being inspired by Ballard’s short stories is easier than novels. With a short story, they’re usually on one level, and get to the point and conclude relatively quickly. A novel is obviously longer, and has a lot more going on. But for me, Ballard’s short stories are more essential than his novels for a variety of reasons — from the late 50s to the early 90s they are just stunning and contain some of the most powerful, experimental and genre-melting fiction this side of the Big Bang. A lot of the ideas that went into his novels were played out in short story form. Plus, in some short story collections such as Vermilion Sands and The Atrocity Exhibition, the boundaries between shorts and novels are somewhat blurred.

Unfortunately, since Empire of the Sun, which put Ballard firmly in the ‘general’ public arena, especially after the film arrived, his short stories seem to have been somewhat ignored. Plus, his actual output of short stories has abated over the last decade. Mind you, there isn’t really the market now that there was back then.

SS: An oft-stated criticism of Ballard, especially his later novels, is that they would have worked better as short stories.

CS: Short stories and novels are two quite separate forms of story telling. Some would argue that a short is never ‘allowed’ to develop, whereas a novel requires more skill in keeping the reader interested. For me there’s just as much skill if not more with a short story. You have to have more acute pacing, deviations from the ‘main’ story aren’t as flexible and there’s not as much time for full character-building as such. As I said above, some of his short stories were developed into novels, so in some respects you can judge the two mediums and the difference between them.

SS: When I interviewed Simon Reynolds, he said that Ballard and Brian Eno are ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ Given that Ballard and Eno are two of your major influences, do you agree with him?

CS: I’ve never really considered Ballard or Eno as thinkers. To me one writes incredibly atmospheric music, the other writes incredibly atmospheric fiction. Both Ballard and Eno are probably my strongest influences, but their influence is very tenuous, difficult to explain. They both invoke that certain mood of isolation. Isolation is a funny thing: it can be forced upon one, or be self-invoked. It seems in today’s world, the last thing you’d really expect is isolation, and yet even in the busiest of places, there are attributes and situations where one can feel it totally. Self-invoked isolation is where the person chooses to step back, away from all the social interaction and so on, to become, in some respects, a suburban exile. I can relate to a lot of Ballard’s fiction and it’s much the same with Eno’s music, although to a lesser extent — Eno isn’t as consistent, and his vocal albums are something else. I don’t mind them, but for me it’s stuff like Music for Films, Apollo, Another Green World, plus a couple of his ambient albums and the two he did with Harold Budd that contain some of the most moody and atmospheric music there is.

SS: You have two albums available for purchase at Fflint Central and one at Earthrid, but Ballard Landscapes is available for free through Earth Monkey. Do you occupy similar ideological ground to Cory Doctorow, who makes his stories and novels available for free online, justifying it like so: ‘Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience.’

CS: Simple answer: he’s hit the nail on the head. A while back I got an email from Earth Monkey, basically asking for contributions to a new net label. I simply thought, ‘why not’? If accepted, it would underline the fact that there’s not just maybe six people who like Cousin Silas, but also, it may well bring in a few more sales for the guys at Fflint and Earthrid. Plus, I’m not exactly in it for the money, but for the simple fact that even if one person ‘got’ or enjoyed Silas, then for me that’s a good return. It does sound awfully clichéd, but it’s how I feel.

SS: Tell us about the process of making the Ballard Landscapes. Do you use field recordings? I hear water drips, factory sounds, electrical hums and glitches.

CS: On some of the material I’ve done, I’ve used the odd field recording: a steam train on ‘Necropolis Line’, a dog barking on ‘John Wayne Gacy Contemplates’, plus a few tracks here and there have had either rain, or drops or a gunshot. The glitches, machinery and hums are all created with synths, editing or processing. You’d be quite surprised at what some of these sounds started as!

SS: A bit like Ballard, then, where you’re never quite sure what’s simulation, what’s ‘authentic’.

CS: I guess I could try and be clever by saying that there are a lot of real vs. artificial oppositions in his fiction, but again, it’s the geography, the ‘feel’, the atmosphere, moods and landscapes I try and convey. A kind of aural texture.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: I’ve absorbed a lot of Ballard-inspired music and I see two distinct strands in sonic interpretations of his work. There’s the world-music camp that picks up on the lush, exotic, jungle tropes. Then there’s the ominous, insidious, unsettling, isolationist elements that appeal to a whole other subset of musicians. You’re aligned with the latter: do you see Ballard as an essentially dystopian, dark fantasist? Or do you, like Ballard himself, see something affirmative in this darkness — a willingness to ‘embrace the catastrophe’ in order to fulfil personal psychological needs?

CS: Maybe I’m just a superficial reader, maybe I don’t really go too deep in what writers are ‘saying’. Then again, if I did, would I lose that certain magic that writers like Ballard give me? I certainly pick up on the isolationism, and the alienation. With Ballard I think he totally disseminated the phrase ‘One Man Against The World’. He created situations where the man was turning his back against the world, or the world was turning its back on him, many variations that basically culminate in isolation. And sure, there are many dark areas in Ballard’s writing — that’s what inspires! To me, though, there’s a point where fiction and music (indeed, most of the ‘arts’) become lost in translation, as it were. I think when ‘deep’ questions are asked about the whys and wherefores, and ‘what does he really mean’, the whole point seems to become lost and diluted.

SS: Do you have a favourite Ballard novel or short story?

CS: That’s a really difficult question to answer. It’s like favourite music and albums — they change weekly, if not daily. Plus, due to his developing writing style, it would be unfair to choose. His earlier period was pretty different and whilst some of his icons and fixations were there, books like The Wind From Nowhere are more akin to John Wyndham. More often than not, I can rest assured that anything by Ballard will get my attention. I have recently been digging out a load of his novels to reread, some I haven’t read in over twenty years. At the time I bought it, I wasn’t too taken with Hello America, but after reading it again I realised what a fine book it is. I was probably overdosing on Ballard back then. I guess, if pushed, I’d have to pick either The Atrocity Exhibition and/or The Terminal Beach, purely for nostalgia, as they were the first ones I read and perhaps had the biggest impact. Then again, The Unlimited Dream Company was a voyage through one hell of a strange landscape… Must read that again soon.

SS: As far as your compositional style goes, were you inspired in any way by Ballard’s experimental techniques, for example, the cut-up nature of Atrocity, or the collages and fake ads he produced around the same time?

CS: I have done the odd cut up, using a variety of sounds. I must be honest, though, I was probably thinking of Burroughs rather than Ballard, although I’ve never been too happy with the results. My new CD on Earthrid is a collaboration with Kevin Busby, recorded under the name Abominations of Yondo, named after a short story by Clark Ashton Smith. I used isolated and combined phrases from that story as inspiration when recording, and I guess that could be classed as a kind of cut up (although I left the ‘cutting up’ to Kevin!). However, I have often been accused of writing pieces which are too short. In my defence I have always maintained that these pieces say it all — any longer and it would lose its way. I guess the same could be said for the pieces in The Atrocity Exhibition: any longer and they wouldn’t be condensed novels. It wouldn’t be The Atrocity Exhibition!

SS: Is the composer Edward Artemiev an influence? You have a track called ‘Leaving Solaris’ on the Necropolis Line album, plus the Ballard track ‘Flight over Abandoned Village’ reminds me of that very displaced feel that Artemiev achieved in his soundtracks for Tarkovsky.

CS: Edward Artemiev hasn’t inspired me as much as his son, Artemiy, who has a label called Electroshock — I keep threatening to send him some material! Solaris was a film that did kind of inspire. I remember Brian Aldiss saying it was one of his fave films so I made a note and can remember watching it many years ago late one night. Stalker was on around the same time as well but I find it difficult sometimes with films like these, especially Stalker. The imagery is just outstanding, but you’re flitting between that and the subtitles so the full impact isn’t what it should be.

SS: You take your name from a Pete Sinfield lyric for King Crimson (‘Cousin Silas grew a beard, drew another flask of weird’). But you’re such a minimal stylist — so how did you name yourself from one of the most bloated songbooks in rock?

CS: It goes back to my mid-teens. I’d picked up a copy of (I think) Sounds, a music mag. With it came a free flexi disc, featuring Emerson Lake & Palmer. The first track was called ‘Brain Salad Surgery’, and then there was a fairly long piece with a load of cut ups/highlights of tracks from the actual album. It was my first foray into ‘proper’ rock music. I bought the album a couple of weeks later and then began a quest! I read up all there was on ELP, and began buying their previous albums. Along this voyage of discovery it came to light that Emerson had been in The Nice, Greg Lake in King Crimson and Carl Palmer did a brief stint with Arthur Brown. I bought some Nice, and Crimson, and then discovered Sinfield had been involved with early Crimson. These days I still listen to Crimson, and still reckon that those first few albums, In the Court of the Crimson King through to Islands, are peerless. I even bought Pete Sinfield’s only solo album, Still. Halcyon days! So, because I am an avid Crimson fan, and one of my fave albums is Lizard (which contains ‘Happy Families’, the song featuring, albeit briefly, Cousin Silas) it was a natural choice. To be fair it wasn’t me who chose the name. I had been ‘named’ something else, I can’t remember what it was but I know I wasn’t too keen on it. Cousin Silas was mentioned and I thought what the hell!

SS: I like Crimson, but I’ve never been able to get on with Sinfield’s imagery. A bit too pompous for me.

CS: Ironically enough, a few mates and myself were on about this the other night! Comparing Sinfield’s lyrics to Jon Anderson’s on ‘And You And I’ and Topographic Oceans, we wondered what ‘really’ was going on in those songs. I always think of Sinfield along the same lines as Fred Frith. On some releases, at face value, Frith ‘sounds’ like he’s not quite got the grip of how the guitar works, and yet on others he plays like a genius. Both of them experiment with their art (indeed, like Ballard in his condensed novels). And, to be fair to Sinfield, he has been behind some incredibly beautiful lyrics. His first foray, In The Court Of The Crimson King, has some great ones, In the Wake of Poseidon less so, and then we get Lizard, which is an album of opposites: some make sense, some don’t. Islands is kind of back on track again. Out of context (sometimes even in!) some make very little sense, but it’s the ‘whole’ that works. And don’t forget, he did write lyrics for Bucks Fizz and Cher!

SS: He even made an album with Eno, based on a Robert Sheckley book.

CS: Here, did you know Brian Eno has only ever acted once, and it was in Father Ted! He played, originally enough, Father Brian Eno.

SS: He did not!

CS: He did. I was watching a batch of Father Ted (the whole three series, actually) and in the last episode, ‘Going to America’, I saw his name on the final credits. I ran it back, and there he is, very briefly. I thought, well, I know he’s done a lot of soundtracks, I wonder how many times he’s actually acted. And if you go on IMDB, there’s only the one entry for him, in Father Ted. I was going to say that this was another thing that Ballard and Eno shared: that they’ve only ever acted the once. But with Ballard, on IMDB, there’s no entry for ‘acting’. However, I remembered the early Crash! thingy… it isn’t even mentioned on IMDB. I was sure he appeared (maybe as himself or a very, very close character) in an old black and white film. I remember him stood near a car, and an actress slightly out of shot in the background. So I looked on YouTube, and there it was. Followed the link, and had a good read on some website or other… Ballardian.com, I think it was. Tee hee.

SS: Will there be a Ballard Landscapes 3?

CS: Don’t tempt me! I honestly could spend the rest of my Silas years doing nothing but pieces inspired by Ballard. I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface. Trouble is, where do you stop? With folks wanting more, and with no more on offer, would that enhance the stuff that’s already there? It’s the Fawlty Towers/Father Ted question: would more have diluted the lasting impact?

..:: TOP 5 BALLARD-RELATED TRACKS FROM COUSIN SILAS, AS CHOSEN BY SILAS HIMSELF

CS: When asked to name a top 5, I chose two and picked three others that are the most popular, judging by Last.fM and other download sites.

‘Vermilion Drift’ (from Ballard Landscapes 2)

CS: Obviously inspired by Vermilion Sands. I loved the way that you could go from the large dunescapes to being shut away inside one of those beach properties.

‘Concrete Islands’ (from Ballard Landscapes 2)

CS: The whole obsession with roads, motorways and cars has featured a lot throughout Ballard’s fiction. As I mentioned, I can remember them building the M62, and once in Madame Tussauds in Blackpool, as a kid, I went into the horror section and saw a mock up of an accident. It left a terrible impression on me for years. I think a motorbike had come off a flyover and hit a car. Nasty… For all that, there is a dark beauty about major roads and motorways when they’re quiet.

‘Empty Airport’ (from Ballard Landscapes 1)

CS: If I remember rightly, there are only two ‘sounds’ on here. I felt that any more would destroy the mood. Indirectly inspired by Ballard’s obsession with airports, and my idea of what one would be like when it’s empty.

‘Bikini Atoll’ (from Ballard Landscapes 1)

CS: I was well into the whole mystique of atomic bombs as a kid, where the results were contrasting in complete opposites: the destruction, with the strangely beautiful blast clouds (check out the mushroom blast of the first H bomb). The secrecy, the technology, the complete warping of nature was fascinating. It was only afterwards when the dust, literally, had settled, that it was revealed how these early tests had totally devastated these small islands of paradise. Earth Monkey put visuals to this track and it’s on Youtube. They did a phenomenal job.

‘Crashed Bomber With Weeds’ (from Falling: An Earth Monkey Sampler)

CS: Okay, so this isn’t on either of the Ballard albums. However, as you might gather from the title, it does have links with ol’ J.G. The Pennines run close to where I live, and from Sheffield, over towards Manchester, that whole backbone has, like iron filings to a magnet, attracted hundreds of air crashes over the years. In the valley, one of these sites witnessed the crash of a flying fortress. I remember looking at the crash site on a web page, and it was literally, a crashed bomber with weeds.

Also, it might be worth mentioning the Geographics album on Earth Monkey [also a free download]. I feel there is a definite link between the Ballard albums and Geo. As I said in the interview, a lot of the empathy I have towards Ballard’s landscapes (airports, airfields, roads, dune, beaches, etc.) come from my own experiences and memories. I try and ‘realise’ these on Geographics. Tracks like ‘The Fog From Immingham’, ‘Abandoned Airfield’, and ‘Cathedral Arch Of Trees (Lincolnshire)’ are all in effect realities, whereas by definition, the Ballard soundscapes are fictions…of a kind.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Cousin Silas at MySpace, including six unreleased tracks.

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.

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).

Here’s an excerpt from the BBC documentary, The Martians and Us, focusing on J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. It features Ballard cheer from Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Will Self, Roger Luckhurst, Brian Stableford and John Sutherland.

[ thanks, Pedro ]