Ballardian

Michael Z. recently wrote to me. Michael is the developer of SurveillanceSaver, the uber-Ballardian screensaver that displays live feeds from over 600 Axis surveillance-camera networks, which I wrote about here.

Michael tells me he has now released a new version for MS Windows with much more cameras, and while I would have been happy to see SurveillanceSaver remain Mac only (because I’m a snob for no good reason save habit and cliche), more cameras can only increase the potential for high weirdness, and that is good.

To celebrate this new release, here is the The Ballardian Primer to CCTV & Surveillance Technology, with all quotes lifted from J.G. Ballard’s novels. As with the Car Park Primer, I’ll have to leave the short stories until a later, less chaotic and less disorganised juncture in my life.

CCTV as a form of social control, as a fully integrated technological system, was implemented in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s, but Ballard was always aware of the power of the lens to flatten time and space and erase identity well before then. Therefore any quotes here that date from before the late 80s should be considered as CCTV’s very own becoming: an AI marshalling its forces, scanning its terrain, scouting for passive, unknowing victims. Indeterminate, invisible. Vapourous. Never quite coalescing.

Until it was defined.

All pics are screengrabs from Axis cameras.

“He moved across to the bank of TV receivers. There were six of them, relaying pictures transmitted from automatic cameras mounted in sealed concrete towers that Marshall had had built at points all over London. The sets were labelled: Campden Hill, Westminster, Hampstead, Mile End Road, Battersea, Waterloo. The pictures flickered and were lashed with interference patterns, but the scenes they revealed were plain enough.”

JGB, The Wind from Nowhere (1961).

“Sequence in slow motion: a landscape of highways and embankments, evening light on fading concrete, intercut with images of a young woman’s body. She lay on her back, her wounded face stressed like fractured ice. With almost dream-like calm, the camera explored her bruised mouth, the thighs dressed in a dark lace-work of blood.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Vaughan followed them everywhere with his camera, zoom lens watching from the observation platform of the Oceanic Terminal at the airport, from hotel mezzanine balconies and studio car-parks. For each of them Vaughan devised an optimum auto-death.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Watching him from my car, parked alongside his own, I could see that even now Vaughan was dramatizing himself for the benefit of these anonymous passers-by, holding his position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame him.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Without Vaughan watching us, recording our postures and skin areas with his camera, my orgasm had seemed empty and sterile, a jerking away of waste tissue.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Many of the women had portable radios slung from their shoulders, which they switched from station to station as if tuning up for an acoustic war. Others carried cameras and flash equipment, ready to record any acts of hostility, any incursions into their territory.”

JGB, High-Rise (1975).

“My skin prickled like over-sensitive camera film, already recording the hints of light that touched the pewter sky above London.”

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

“‘Take it easy…’ Paco eyed Wayne defensively, unsure about the wisdom of admitting this volatile newcomer to their private teenage domain. ‘I only saw you on film — we have a few robot cameras on the other side of the Rockies, with trip-zooms that focus on anything that moves. It’s bad about your two friends, though.’”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“He was still wearing the safari suit, and sat in front of his TV consoles — vivid colour pictures of Las Vegas at night taken by a camera on the roof of the Desert Inn. He looked pale but alert, as if he had decided long ago to dispense with sleep by a simple executive decree.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Behind him he heard the sinister clatter of the two robot gunships, these blank angels which Manson moved around the sky. They came down from the night and hung fifty feet above him as he strode along the centre of the Strip, gatlings pointed at his back, camera zooms in their empty cockpits straining to catch Wayne’s profile.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Manson glared at Wayne as if he were a malfunctioning robot. He fumbled with a set of buttons inlaid into the table top, his fingers scrabbling for the familiar contours like a blind man comforting himself with a rosary. ‘Look, Wayne, you can see it! There’s your virus!’
The television screens loomed into close-up. The pictures were transmitted from a series of cameras somewhere off Interstate 15.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Carter ran head on through a plate-glass window. Picked up by a lobby camera, his startled face was frozen for ever in an immense, dazed smile.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“They clattered down the stairs and ran along the quay, following the remote-control camera mounted between the landing rails of this chimeric machine, like the devotees of a new televised religion.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“We had rested through the night under the roof of the hangar, where the wounds to my head and ear had dried again. But the torn muscles of my scalp set it askew on my skull, and in turn seemed to tilt my mind, so that it perceived the world at an odd angle, like a misaligned camera.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“The pearly rectangle, scarcely larger than a light-bulb, shrank me down to size, like everything else on which the camera turned its eye, and stripped away the irrelevancies of emotion, pain, and motive. Only my obsession endured, a great dream made small by failures of nerve, but a great dream nevertheless.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“A security guard is lying on the floor below the row of television monitors, their screens a blizzard of snow. Someone has cut the cable running from the surveillance cameras mounted all over the estate, but clearly Officer Turner had no time to reach for the telephone whose scissored cord hangs from the desk above his head.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“The surveillance camera, as if bored with nothing to do, began to scan the house in close-up. The superb lenses, representing the most advanced optical technology, showed every detail with unnerving clarity. The camera panned along the plate-glass windows of the lounge and dining room. The undisturbed furniture could be clearly seen, even a clock registering 8:20 on a mantelpiece.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“Already I resented the camera, staring at me like a deformed robot.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Drained of emotion and value-judgement, the lens of the scientific camera anatomised the world around it like a patient and pensive voyeur.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Even the empty camera in whose lens we were reflected had helped to shape our sex act. As she smoothed her eyebrows Carmen was measuring her profile against the lens, preparing herself for the even more elaborate sex films in which she would appear.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“With its passive and unobtrusive despotism, the camera governed the smallest spaces of our lives. Even in the privacy of our own homes we had all been recruited to play our parts in what were little more than real-life commercials.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“The camera lens was our way of disengaging from each other, distancing ourselves from each other’s emotions.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Here, under the neutral gaze of the rostrum camera, a recruited force of volunteers had explored every legal permutation of lesbian, homosexual and heterosexual intercourse.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“As she lay with her laboratory partner, a remote-controlled camera recorded the involuntary movements of her facial musculature, the flushing of her breasts and abdomen, the skin tremors on the backs of her thighs.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“We were watched by the lenses of a dozen cameras, multiplied and dismantled at the same time.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“When Janet Bracewell called to Neil he turned to face the camera, aware that his chief role was to provide a poignant end-credit to the transmissions.”

JGB, Rushing to Paradise (1994.

“He gestured with a long arm at the villas on the hillside, secure behind their surveillance cameras. ‘I’ve lived here for two years and I’m still not sure if the place is real…’”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell.
Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“I watched him drive away, and repeated his last words to myself. No crime at Estrella de Mar, no drug-dealing, burglaries or car thefts? In fact, the entire resort was wired up to crime like a cable TV network. It fed itself into almost every apartment and villa, every bar and nightclub, as anyone could see from the defensive nervous system of security alarms and surveillance cameras.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“The Sanger villa stood across the road, windows shuttered, the surveillance camera fixed on the litter of cigarette packets and advertisement flyers in the drive. Pushed by the wind, they edged towards the graffiti-covered doors of the garage, as if hoping to be incorporated into this lurid collage.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Crawford pointed to the crenellated wall. ‘Look at it, Charles … it’s a fortified medieval city. This is Goldfinger’s defensible space raised to an almost planetary intensity — security guards, tele-surveillance, no entrance except through the main gates, the whole complex closed to outsiders. It’s a grim thought, but you’re looking at the future.’”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“He fixed his aviator glasses over his eyes and glanced around the car park, counting the surveillance cameras as if calculating the best getaway route.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“‘Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs to the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We’re moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“Surveillance cameras hung like gargoyles from the cornices, following me as I approached the barbican and identified myself to the guard at the reception desk.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘People are so immersed in their work they wouldn’t recognize the end of the world. It explains why no one saw anything unusual about Greenwood. There’s no civic sense here.’

‘There is.’ Halder pointed to a nearby surveillance camera. ‘Think of it as a new kind of togetherness.’”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“We began to climb the steep road that led towards the billionaire heights of Super-Cannes. Luxury villas as lavish as palaces stood in their groomed parks. On the wrought-iron gates, surveillance cameras crouched like hawks.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘These security cameras . . . I have to be careful. I’m in Hammersmith, the King Street shopping mall. Consumer hell.’”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“Nothing now made sense except in terms of a transient airport culture. Warning displays alerted each other, and the entire landscape was coded for danger. CCTV cameras crouched over warehouse gates, and filter-left signs pulsed tirelessly, pointing to the sanctuaries of high-security science parks.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“Everything about him, from his large feet in a pair of unmatched trainers to the tic that pulled at an infected ear piercing, fixed him firmly as an urban scarecrow designed to frighten away any circling security cameras.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“The riot soon began to drink itself into befuddlement, but bands of more determined ice-hockey followers joined forces with track-and-field supporters and marched on an industrial estate in run-down east Brooklands, a night-time wilderness of video cameras and security patrols.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“‘This isn’t a suburb of London, it’s a suburb of Heathrow and the M25. People in Hampstead and Holland Park look down from the motorway as they speed home from their West Country cottages. They see faceless inter-urban sprawl, a nightmare terrain of police cameras and security dogs, an uncentred realm devoid of civic tradition and human values.’”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ Car Parks: The Ballardian Primer