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- ‘Take off your glasses, Corey’: Piercing the Veil of J.G. Ballard’s Billboard FictionsJanuary 4
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Fictitious billboard campaign starring ‘David Cruise’, created for Ballard’s Kingdom Come. Image courtesy the Metro-Centre.
Billboards loom large in Ballard’s work, symbol of the wraparound reality that advertising and media came to represent with the advent of the 60s and the age of mass consumerism. The imagery is more than metaphor: Ballard aimed to pierce the fourth wall of his fiction. As far back as 1958, he was actually thinking of ways to project his writing onto external media space, concocting an ‘entire unpublished novel designed to go on billboards’, according to Martin Bax
, Ballard’s one-time editor. For Ballard, Bax explains, the idea was that advertising was so invasive, so intimately integrated with everyday life, it was virtually the only thing people read and truly pay attention to, if only on a subconscious level. Therefore a novel, to have the maximum impact, should be designed as advertising. This was a radical thesis for the era, at a time when we might safely assume the average consumer did not question the psychological effects of the media fictions that informed daily life; we were a long way away from today’s hyperaware, ultra-self-reflexive prosumer demographic.
Detail from Ballard’s ‘billboard novel’.
Although that superlative idea never came off, Ballard continued to erect billboards within his writing, notably in ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963). In this masterpiece of paranoic SF, we are plunged into a near-future world structured around conformity and planned obsolescence. There’s only one make of car, produced in the same colour and the same specifications each year and designed to wear out at six-month intervals. In fact there’s only one make of everything — cigarettes, household goods, foodstuffs — and consumers become locked into shopping contracts, with housewives making ‘huge volume purchases of food, clothing and appliances against substantial overall price cuts, and forced to drive around all day from supermarket to supermarket, frantically trying to keep pace with their purchase schedules and grappling with the added incentives inserted to keep the schemes alive’.
A man named Hathaway becomes increasingly agitated about a series of giant signs over a hundred feet high that are being erected ‘on the traffic islands outside town’ and on the perimeter of shopping centres. They don’t advertise anything — their facades are blank, shuttered grilles — so their true purpose is a mystery, and everyone assumes they must be part of an aviation warning system. But Hathaway believes they carry subliminal messages designed to control the minds of the citizenry. As he says to Dr Franklin, whom he is madly trying to convince of his reality:
‘They’ll soon have all the approach roads covered. When they do we might as well stop thinking… Tomorrow they’ll start lifting them up all over the city, they’ll block off half the sky! … We’ve got to stop them, Doctor, they’re trying to transistorize our brains!
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If you can’t believe your own senses what chance have you left? They’re invading your brain, if you don’t defend yourself they’ll take it over completely! We’ve got to act now before we’re all paralysed.’Franklin is unconvinced, but eventually Hathaway’s persistence provokes him into thinking about the nature of the system in which they live, and he begins to question the workings of this ‘over-capitalized industrial system’. Later, Franklin spies Hathaway climbing one of the billboards, attacking a switch-box, destroying the sign’s grill and revealing a cycling and repeating display underneath:
BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YESThe phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.
The denouement is about as dark an ending as could be conceived of in 1963: after Hathaway is shot by the police and falls to his death, Franklin orders yet another new car as if nothing had ever happened. The story’s final line abandons all hope:
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.
Like the blades of enormous scythes…
I’ve never forgotten the impact of that phrase, and the evil intent behind it, and it’s always at the forefront of my mind whenever I see a billboard carrying some kind of inane advertising babble. Like Hathaway, I want to scale the signs and attack them, where I imagine I’d harangue the pedestrians below: ‘Throw yourself onto the road, you haven’t got a chance!’ Billboards in Ballard’s work seem like the edge of reality, resembling the limits of the environment in a computer game, where the player is unable to travel beyond a mountain range because the electronically generated landscape has not been further mapped or pixelated. If the player persists, he or she will encounter an indistinct wall preventing further egress. This effect is apparent in Crash, where the horizon of the motorway system literalises consumerist virtuality:
During my weeks in hospital the highway engineers had pushed its huge decks more than half a mile further south. Looking closely at this silent terrain, I realized that the entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges. These encircled the vehicles below like the walls of a crater several miles in diameter.
Ballard, Crash.
The texture of ‘The Subliminal Man’ is chillingly prescient, especially in its central message, that the media landscape has redefined the world as itself. Yet it is essentially old-style ‘message SF’: socially aware science fiction depicting ‘one man against the system’, where the hero’s rebellion is brutally crushed and his broken body used as a totem to warn the rest of society. Today, the system fights back in very different ways, with absorption: the time lag between shocking radicalism and flaccid cliché is infinitesimal, as Ballard noted in a 1978 discussion of punk music:
What is interesting now is that the time span between the Rebel — the Revolution — and Total Social Acceptance — is getting shorter and shorter… In the future (this is part of the problem in the arts as well) you’ll get some radical new idea, but within 3 minutes it’s totally accepted, and it’s coming out in … your local supermarket.
JGB interviewed by Jon Savage, Search & Destroy, 1978.
As The Atrocity Exhibition so brilliantly demonstrated, the nature of the media landscape in the late 60s meant that inner and outer reality would be irrevocably reversed. Anticipating Baudrillard’s simulations, there is no longer any external reflection by the image in Atrocity, but rather feedbacks of feedbacks of feedbacks. According to Ballard in his annotations to Atrocity, ‘even the concept of privacy is constructed from publicly circulating materials. It is now almost impossible to be ourselves except on the world’s terms’. In this, Atrocity updates the thesis of ‘The Subliminal Man’, providing a media landscape in which there is literally nowhere to turn, literally nothing to rebel against, anticipating (and accelerating; going completely beyond) Debord’s sense of a ‘Society of the Spectacle’, in which, as the latter identified, ‘modern conditions of production prevail, all of life [presenting] itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation’.
Photo: Simon Sellars.
As Dominika Oramus notes of Ballard’s characters:
People live surrounded by texts which invade their minds, but they cannot focus long enough to appreciate any complex messages. The characters dream about violence and excitement in their own lives, and the mediascape (ever full of aggressive imagery) makes them long for the re-enactment of atrocities: ‘all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives’.
Of course, the annexation of unconscious urges is a long-entrenched tactic of advertising, to which semiotics is an effective testament, especially as applied to popular culture by Barthes. Semiological concerns inform The Atrocity Exhibition and the following extracts clearly show the philosophy Ballard had outlined in his New Worlds guest editorials and articles working its way into his fiction, especially the assertion that ‘fictional elements in the world around us are multiplying to the point where it is almost impossible to distinguish between the “real” and the “false”‘, with imagery from the media landscape bleeding into the actual terrain enclosing the characters:
They drove through the endless suburbs of the city. The hoardings multiplied around them, walling the streets with giant replicas of napalm bombings in Vietnam, the serial deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe terraced in the landscape of Dien Bien Phu and the Mekong Delta.
These designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the fundamental relationship between the identity of the film actress, and the millions who were distant reflections of her, and the time and space of their own bodies and postures. The planes of their lives locked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the deities of the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives, the film actress and her fragmented body provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness.
Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition.
In Atrocity, media fantasies are beamed into the central character’s subconscious and the image is then reconfigured and retooled by his fractured psyche and beamed back out, enveloping the world in a schizophrenic drone of competing fictions and paranoid fantasies. As Ballard puts it in his annotations: ‘Throughout The Atrocity Exhibition, the nervous systems of the characters have been externalized, as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning nervous system’. The central character sees the ‘terraced images of breast and buttock’ of the women around him ingrained in balconies, sand dunes, angles between walls. Billboards appear from nowhere, ‘cinemascope of breast and thigh’. He seeks to re-enact the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, concocting alternate celebrity death fantasies starring his mistress in various death-driven poses. She dies and is reborn in every chapter. There is no limit to the multiple fantasies the media landscape feeds to him, and which nourish his psychopathic tendencies, which then take on a life of their own — an invasion of the actual by the virtual.
Ballard’s achievement here is not to be understated; as an analysis of hyperreality — of supersaturated supermodernity — it was demonstrably ahead of its time. In the world of advertising today there is literally no where to turn: the spectacle is complete, self-sealed, airless. Aggression is sold as product, product is internalised, and aggression is reprojected back into the blank screen of the media landscape, where it is sensationalised and resold as moral panic. Take the Hummer ad that recently appeared on billboards all over Melbourne. What message does it convey? Most obviously, the angle of the shot emphasises the bulbous grille and fat tyres. It anthropomorphises the vehicle, which is clearly supposed to evoke the gaping mouth of some vicious creature raised on its hind legs, ready to strike. The windscreen (and therefore any window onto humanity, ie the driver) is barely in view; it’s all about the machine, with a power, agression and artificial intelligence entirely its own. Any trace of the human is completely effaced. The vehicle is gleaming, reflective, hyperreal and superstylised. It’s as fetishised as a digitally airbrushed stripper on a Spearmint Rhino ad. Take in the entire package, including the highly confrontational phrase: ‘Now get lost’. What is the ad really saying? Nothing less than ‘admire me, admire my vehicle, and then GET OUT OF MY SIGHT otherwise I WILL DESTROY YOU’.
Sensationally, the advertising worked — to the letter. In Melbourne, a man and his wife were admiring what was thought to be a Hummer parked in the centre of the city. When the man said to the driver, ‘I love your car’, six people got out of the vehicle and bashed him senseless with an iron bar. As I have written before in Ballardian terms, when advertising has colonised every available inch of public space, when every angle has been exhausted, then the only place left to go is the inside of your skull and your deepest, darkest fears: here, Hummer buys your nightmares for a song, then sells them back to you as reality as you fight for your life on a drip in the city hospital.
(Melbourne police have actually taken delivery of a one-off Hummer pursuit vehicle, bequeathed to them as a ‘promotional tool’. Hopefully they won’t follow the logic of the billboard, bashing people who come too near, but if they do then the cycle really will be complete: state-sanctioned brutality advertised as ironic violence).
The Melbourne Police Force’s new toy: ‘Now get lost’.
Another recent ad campaign plastered all over billboards and TV was attributed to the Roads and Traffic Authority in New South Wales. This campaign attempted to stop speeding drivers by belittling their manhood, suggesting that anyone who speeds has a small penis and is showing off to compensate.
(As a blunt instrument, it’s on par with another famous Australian road campaign, with its winsome slogan: ‘If you drink then drive, you’re a bloody idiot’. Australia: not so much the nanny state, as the school-bully state…)
Soon after the RTA campaign appeared, a man faced court charged with road rage after he threw a bottle at a woman in the car next to his. His excuse was that she had enraged him by making the sign towards him:
‘She started doing that hand gesture, you know, the RTA one… And it offended me… because of, you know, ‘small’… she implied I had a small penis.’
As Oramus writes, ‘audiovisual media in Ballard gives people models to follow, and shapes the way people receive reality, the result being that what is not on screen does not count’. This man’s reaction in court, although ludicrous, almost reminds me of Franklin in ‘The Subliminal Man’: ‘Look, these billboards have hidden powers! Why won’t anyone believe me?’ More exactly, Scott Bukatman
, writing about Ballard’s short story, ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977), says that ‘The surrogate experience provided by the media has fully usurped, and even surpassed, the potentials of actual experience’ through the mediation of all social interaction via technology. In ‘Intensive Care’, the medium is television, but it’s not too hard to extrapolate that to the present day and to social networking, and even back to the good old medium of billboards, now being reconfigured as artificial intelligence, digital tracking stations that plug into your identity from the moment you leave your house to the moment you arrive at work.
In Atrocity, Ballard says we ‘can only make contact through a new alphabet of sensation and violence’; completely subsumed in media fictions, any attempt to step outside of them increasingly seems to end in violence and even death. Assisting the cause, the Australian media, as always, promotes divisiveness and attacks soft targets in its efforts to feed its flagging nervous tissue, hungry for sensationalism and headlines. The small real estate of the standard billboard is now no longer enough — the entire world has become the billboard, a blank, endlessly reinscribed screen filled with subliminal intent.
As an example, in Brisbane, online columnist John Birmingham actually advocated physical violence against cyclists who dare to hold him up in city traffic:
Has is it ever occurred to you that maybe bicycle riders don’t belong in the city? It did to me the other morning as I crawled across the Story Bridge at about 12 klicks-per behind some stupidly smug, selfish git on one of those dumb-arse bikes you sort of lie back into like a recliner lounge. This dude was trundling along in the middle of the city-bound lane, presumably well aware of the thousand or more commuters he was holding up, not really exerting himself to go even a little bit faster, not making any effort to unclog the traffic blockage that he and he alone was causing, and, I have no doubt, revelling in the warm, sanctimonious glow of the self-righteous tool as he contemplated all the grams of carbon he was keeping out of the atmosphere.
It’s entirely possible he was even drawing some contentment from the very inconvenience he was causing so many others, reckoning his personally inspired episode of gridlock to be a lesson to irresponsible vehicle owners who are killing the planet and straining the health system with their unhealthy lifestyles.
How much did I regret not getting that anti-personnel Metal Storm pod installed when I had the car serviced last time?
Elsewhere in this piece, Birmingham dredges up the old argument that cyclists are a menace by referring to the death of pedestrian James Gould in Melbourne after he was hit by a cyclist bunch at high speed, an incident that, while tragic, is still being used three years later as a weapon against people who circumvent the powerful car lobby by choosing to ride bikes. Using this isolated incident (the only death of a pedestrian at the hands of a cyclist in Melbourne in living memory; funny how he doesn’t refer to the many cyclists killed by cars that year), Birmingham proceeds to whip up a storm of hatred against all cyclists (an extremely dirty tactic that, as we shall see, he decries when used by others). In the comments section of his blog, his followers took up the call, branding cyclists ‘poofs’, ‘clowns’ and ‘dickheads’ and coming up with more ways to kill them — like ‘rotating knives on car tyres’ (Birmingham might think such comments are harmless fun, but in Britain the journalist Matthew Parris advocated stringing piano wire across cycle paths to decapitate cyclists, then had to apologise and retract his attempt at ‘humour’ when real-life stories of cyclists being garroted subsequently came to light; I’ve also written previously about my own experiences observing how anti-cyclist hatred is rife on the roads after such articles get printed).
But what is really hard to fathom is that in a later column, Birmingham came out in support of Sudanese refugees in Australia who have been marginalised and victimised by government propaganada. I don’t dispute for a second the trials and tribulations of refugees in this country, but what I do find extraordinary is that Birmingham plays the bigotry card, hypocritically ignoring the hatred and prejudice dripping from his anti-cyclist rant.
Now indulge me for a moment: take the previous quote and substitute the cyclist with one of Birmingham’s refugees (and please be patient, for I have to get into the mindset of the man):
Has is it ever occurred to you that maybe Sudanese don’t belong in this country? It did to me the other morning as I waited in line behind some stupidly smug, selfish git wearing one of those dumb-arse skull caps. This dude was holding up the supermarket lane, presumably well aware of the hordes of consumers he was inconveniencing, not really exerting himself to speak English, and, I have no doubt, revelling in the warm, sanctimonious glow of the self-righteous tool as he contemplated all the arrogant white people he had kept waiting.
How much did I regret not buying that double-barrel shotgun when I last went shopping?
In this light, we can identify exactly the kind of prejudice the hypocritical Birmingham foams about — and it’s emanating directly from the man himself in the form of his appalling double standards.
Now, observe Birmingham’s Sudan rant, where he takes to task selective government portrayals of young Sudanese as thugs and gangsters, the kind of selective reportage he is guilty of using against cyclists:
I live in one of the ‘exhausted’, ‘terrorised’ suburbs they’re talking about and I know for a stone cold certainty that They Are Lying.
I have no doubt that in any community where significant numbers of migrants settle, you will be able to dredge up a couple of ‘anecdotes’ from the police blotter about a handful of young men who have not adapted to life in their new country, who are falling into a pattern of criminality, and whose very appearance is enough to ‘terrorise’ little old ladies and idiots.
And with that in mind, allow me to switch sides one more time, but this time with authority for I’m a cyclist who rides 200-300km a week and obeys all road rules, as do all the people I ride with. Here, I know what I’m talking about…
I live in one of the ‘terrorised’ suburbs that people like Birmingham talk about in their anti-cyclist screeds and I know for a stone cold certainty that He Is Lying. I have no doubt that in any community where significant numbers of cyclists ride, you will be able to dredge up a couple of ‘anecdotes’ from the police blotter about a handful of young men who have not adapted to the roads, and whose very appearance is enough to ‘terrorise’ little old ladies and idiots.
Fictitious billboard campaign starring ‘David Cruise’, created for Ballard’s Kingdom Come. Image courtesy the Metro-Centre.
Obviously I am in no way suggesting cyclists have suffered as much as Sudanese refugees, my point merely being to suggest that Ballard’s ‘new alphabet of sensation and violence’ is alive and well in Australia and is available in many media-sanctioned flavours. Think of it like a reversible jacket: wear one colour when the reverse is out of fashion; sport the other when the tide changes. Or the blank signs and billboards of ‘The Subliminal Man’. In fact, I have become increasingly shocked to realise more and more that the hatred and prejudice that has always bubbled below the surface of white Australia’s history is relentless in its need for an outlet, a safety valve. You can go to jail for beating up a black man, but don’t worry: transfer that rage instead to the latest consumer-driven enemy and get off scot free.
Disturbingly, this is the thesis of Ballard’s 2006 novel Kingdom Come, for Ballard was right on the money: this is the world we live in.
In fact, Birmingham, a sometime novelist and now king of new-media journalism, known to his fans as ‘JB’ (a handle he self-applies, asking questions of his readers like ‘Can you join the dots for JB now, kids?’) reminds me of no less a figure than David Cruise. With a similar trajectory to Birmingham, in Kingdom Come Cruise turned from his old media career (as a talk-show host) and reinvented himself in new media as a noir hero of television ads and billboards, advertising psychopathological concepts such as ‘mad is bad; bad is good’; roused, his minions, like JB’s fans, take up the call, barely questioning what they are following. Like Birmingham, Cruise ‘talks’ to his own media image. And, like Birmingham, Cruise picks on soft targets:
David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport.
New enemies were always needed, and one in particular was soon found.
Ballard, Kingdom Come.
Birmingham indeed found a new enemy — the catch-all ‘cyclists’. He keeps the details ‘deliberately vague’; he extrapolates one negative incident into a generalisation about an entire community; he refers only to surface appearances and always dehumanises the enemy, in this case evil hordes of ‘Lycra-wearing lunatics’ who won’t answer back because they can’t, unable to compete for media space with the powerful car lobby that controls both State coffers and massive expanses of advertising; he then uses the resultant outrage to galvanise consumers and sell thuggery to the masses…
Hummer, too, sells thuggery to the masses — all too successfully. The billboard influences real world violence, as we have seen. The billboard reflects reality; reality is the billboard. In Kingdom Come, this feedback loop accelerates to such an extent that the Metro-Centre shopping centre actually secedes from society — the entire world has become an enormous shopping mall in which hate is the biggest and brightest seller. The metaphoric billboard again becomes the edge of reality divider. The entity ‘John Birmingham’ becomes an interactive billboard, a digital Jumbotron TV screen stuck to one channel and peddling a consumer-driven ’soft fascism’ to an eager army of unquestioning, loyal followers.
‘Soft fascism’, what’s that? In an article about another violent event widely reported in Australia, Stephen Smith begins with a quotation from Kingdom Come: ‘This is a soft fascism, like the consumer landscape. No goose-stepping, no jackboots, but the same emotions and the same aggression’. The article details an incident in which a gang of Melbourne youths filmed their attacks on homeless people and their sexual assault of a girl, packaging the footage on a DVD to sell to their friends and uploading excerpts to YouTube:
It appears that the public’s consumption of news media about the whole incident is part of a cycle of action and reaction. Here, it is the ‘bent’ turn of consumerism that is precisely the problem. For what lies on the other side of easy blame is a desensitisation to violence in our midst. After all, the most compelling aspect of the DVD is that its makers see it as a commercial product – a consumer item…
We need to realise how violence has become part of consumerism. It seems that such measured doses of violence are now an inescapable part of our culture. In this respect we must face the possibility that consumerism has become what amounts to ’soft fascism’. In this state we now enter a society that craves the image but at the cost of a loss of care and responsibility for the type of reality being represented.
In Kingdom Come, the character Pearson has a realisation after witnessing an attack on a Brooklands mosque: ‘I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger. The decision by the estate-dwellers to reject the imam was an exercise of consumer choice’. The instigators of the DVD incident exercised the same ‘freedom of choice’. Linking consumerism (’the model for all human behaviour’, even racism) with the technology of multidimensional, interlinked and instantaneous communications networks (’PIN numbers’), Ballard shows how the consumer landscape is encoded with the same ‘powers of control’ through the integration of CCTV with entertainment and, finally, a post-advertising environment, lifestyle as surveillance and surveillance as lifestyle: the end-state of consumerism, which has broken free from the virtual reality of the billboard to completely invade the actual.
In a 2003 interview, Ballard highlights our complicity:
The future may well be a marriage between Microsoft and the Disney Company — an infantilised entertainment culture imposed on us by the most advanced communications technology. What I fear for my grandchildren is a benign dystopia of ever-present surveillance cameras watching us for our own good, a situation in which we will acquiesce, all too well aware of our attraction to danger.
Where do we turn?
In k-punk’s appraisal of the work of Jamie Reid, he ended with a forlorn call to arms, a call to pierce the veil, couching the cycle of rebellion-absorption-aggression-product in terms similar to Ballard’s:
Capitalist realism — the idea that capitalism is the inevitable terminus awaiting all societies fortunate enough to reach the End of History — relies on a naturalization of current social conditions, a naturalization that photoshops out politics and replaces it with TV parliamentarianism. The significance of Jamie Reid’s work was always to estrange the environment presented to us as natural by advertising. All culture in the 21st century tends to the condition of advertising. More than ever, we live inside adverts and adverts are inside us. The environments we move through are walk-through, interpassive simulations, and we are the carriers of a pulsing videodrome signal that has colonized our unconscious, secreting its banal aspirations into our electric dreams. Specific adverts sell products, but the form of advertising sells Capital itself. Nothing else is on offer.
Reid’s work reminds us of a time when it seemed possible to step outside the banalizing boulevards of advertising, to a time, that is to say, when the strategy of detournement had not itself been incorporated into the massive recuperation that is postmodernism, the cultural logical of late capitalism. Late capitalism’s wrap-around, seamless, CGI-enhanced semiotic terrain is so totally pervasive that it makes the idea of a Spectacle seem quaint. Where is the new Jamie Reid who can rouse us from our Restoration stupor, where is the cyberpunk that can blast a hole in the naturalised Graphic-User Interface of late capital’s mega-Matrix?
(Actually, where is the cyberpunk that can blast a hole in John Birmingham’s smug head — oh, sorry, have I offended someone? Or is massive violence only allowed against sanctioned targets?)In Australia some media commentators, unbelievably, suggested that ‘notorious’ ‘party boy’ Corey Delaney was such a hero, anticipating a future career for him in which he would play the media like a harp and stage provocations that would indeed shake us awake (for non-Australians, Delaney is a teenager who staged a huge party in an outer Melbourne suburb while his parents were away, spreading the word via MySpace, causing the neighbours to panic, incurring the wrath of the police, gaining huge amounts of media coverage, and appearing on current affairs programs where he refused to apologise for his actions, mumbling incoherently with all the elan of a male Paris Hilton, while his TV interrogators egged him on (much like Bill Grundy vs Steve Jones) at the same time as they engaged in sickening moral handwringing and patronising verbal jabs at the ‘youth of today’. ‘Can you join the dots for SS now, kiddies’? Hummer: love me/get lost. Birmingham: that hate bad/this hate good).
- Grand Theft Auto IV: Ballardian atrocitiesJanuary 2
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Martin Pichlmair has written an interesting article for Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, ‘Grand Theft Auto IV considered as an Atrocity Exhibition’, that draws parallels between the controversial GTA and Ballard’s most experimental work:
This review outlines the intersections between Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North, 2008) and the British novelist J.G. Ballard’s experimental text “The Atrocity Exhibition”. Obvious parallels like the dominant roles of cars and carnage are supplemented by more subtle similarities. Grand Theft Auto is an “Atrocity Exhibition”, a deliberately instigated scandal, and a cynical masterpiece.
…
J.G. Ballard is convinced that science fiction authors should pursue the exploration of inner landscapes rather than be writing about adventures in outer space. Not unlike Grand Theft Auto, he seeks to articulate the pathology that underlies consumer society… Most of his novels exhib - ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic ClearDecember 24 2008
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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
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
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
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
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
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.
- ‘Here’s to the borderzone’: life after the PhDDecember 18 2008
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I don’t like to get personal on this website. However, there is something I need to acknowledge, because it involves on a significant level the readers of this site and its contributors.
The final version of my doctoral thesis on Ballard was accepted and submitted today. All that remains now is to formally graduate early next year. This ends a certain phase. I began the doctorate in 1995 at Monash University, but suffered a bit of burn out and walked away from it in 1997. I didn’t read Ballard for a long time after that (having forged a subsequent career as a travel writer) and only really became fully reacquainted with his work when I started this website up in 2005. If I was being honest, I realised I was disappointed in myself for not completing the degree, and I think the website was probably a subconscious desire to reconnect with this former life. Then in 2006, through the site, I came back into contact with my supervisor and began to entertain the possibility of returning.
In April 2007 I resumed the doctorate, even though I only had just 15 months left on my enrolment. I thought that I would be able to use much of the research and notes I’d completed the first time around, but soon found that while my thematic framework was intact, my focus on technology and the psychology of new media meant that pretty much everything had to be re-researched and rewritten, as obviously ‘technology’ has changed so much in the last 10 years. I also had to rea
- Happy birthday, Philip K DickDecember 17 2008
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