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This is very good post. It is really worth reading….

To Dublin, then, where last week the National College of Art and Design held a one-day symposium on hauntology. Highlights for me included Susan MacWilliam, who talked about a series of films and installations devoted to seances, telepathy and……

architecture students should be thought ballard if they are already not. and i agree geoff should do it with special guest bryan finoki of subtopia (smiley or a wink here if i may. sorry i couldn’t resist after the pitch).
actually 06 sci arc thesis projects i recently saw, had some connections to this, let’s say, a ballardian tone. but a lot of them failed at working the realities it exposed. most students sucked the people out of buildings they designed, and the cities were done as if they inhaled density and exhaled virgin surfaces in one easy step. they were in denial.they lacked end users. solutions for whom and what. there are billions of people out there.
but if you say billions died from deseases except some road warriors, i’d say fuck everybody including ballard and the architecture etc., and let’s mass suicide to finish this earthly misery.

they are now pumping petrolium from central asia to eastern mediterrannian sea in pipes, some of that eventualy ending up in our cars, chances are. all this in fascinating speeds. and, because of those pipelines and other circuits, there are new cities, foods, clothing, newer exchange values and vicious circles being developed as well.
avarage person plus professional architects and planners have a lot of catching up to do, mainly mentaly, as mid-future approaches.
i suggest the ballardians start to visit with architects and vice versa. or resign to eat routing machine dust and die, never negatively charging the situation that would eventually matter.

I really enjoy all the speculation about the consequences of living in a world designed by other people – but it’s not just architects who over-determine the spaces we inhabit – there’s got to be an Ikea novel out there somewhere… or a study of Oxo Good Grips’ evolutionary impact… even Swiffers seem very resonant, in a way I can’t quite formulate.

Cory Doctorow : BLDGBlog’s GM sez, “Ballardian.com just posted a conversation I recorded with them this…

BLDGBlog’s GM sez, “Ballardian.com just posted a conversation I recorded with them this past summer, about J.G. Ballard, corporate office parks, science fiction, sexual repression, the Taliban, David Cronenberg, the Paris riots, shopping malls, Briti…

Mark was a dupe, a palooka, in the Equatorial Guinea coup. Now, Tim Spicer, on the other hand…a mercenary ex-SAS man educated at Eton and Oxford (where he got a first, not a gent’s third) and oilfield investor, who had been so bored in civil life he appeared in a TV dramatisation of the Bloody Sunday massacre, before going back to war. Now that’s what I call Ballardian.