Archive for the ‘dystopia’ Category
By
Simon Sellars •
Jun 26th, 2017 •
Category:
academia, alternate worlds, Applied Ballardianism, Australia, autobiography, Ballardosphere, biography, Bruce Sterling, CCTV, celebrity culture, Chris Marker, consumerism, cyberpunk, David Cronenberg, deep time, Dubai, dystopia, H.P. Lovecraft, inner space, Jean Baudrillard, Lead Story, Marion Shoard, media landscape, occult, Pacific, paranormal, Paul Virilio, William Burroughs, William Gibson, WWII
Forthcoming from Urbanomic in late 2017 – Applied Ballardianism: A Theory of Nothing by Simon Sellars. Fleeing the excesses of 90s cyberculture, a young researcher sets out to systematically analyse the obsessively reiterated themes of a writer who prophesied the disorienting future we now inhabit. The story of his failure is as disturbingly psychotropic as those of his magus—J.G. Ballard, voluptuary of the car crash, surgeon of the pathological virtualities pulsing beneath the surface of reality. An existential odyssey inextricably weaving together lived experience and theoretical insight, this startling autobiographical hyperfiction surveys and dissects a world that is unmistakably Ballardian.
By
Simon Sellars •
Mar 13th, 2016 •
Category:
advertising, alternate worlds, architecture, Ben Wheatley, brutalism, consumerism, death of affect, dystopia, features, gated communities, Interior design, Lead Story, urban decay, urban revolt, urban ruins, utopia
High-Rise, Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, is released in the UK on 18 March. To celebrate, here’s a collection of all the clips and trailers so far.
By
Ballardian •
Mar 5th, 2016 •
Category:
America, celebrity culture, Donald Trump, dystopia, features, Lead Story, politics, sexual politics
Donald Trump as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality.
By
Simon Sellars •
Dec 15th, 2015 •
Category:
advertising, alternate worlds, architecture, Ben Wheatley, brutalism, David Cronenberg, drained swimming pools, dystopia, features, film, Lead Story, leisure, urban revolt, urbanism
High-Rise, Ben Wheatley’s much-anticipated adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel, goes on general release in March 2016. The first trailer was released recently, bringing excitement to the boil, for not only does the trailer adapt Ballard, it also homages Cronenberg.
By
Simon Sellars •
Jul 3rd, 2013 •
Category:
alternate worlds, Applied Ballardianism, Bruce Sterling, CCTV, celebrity culture, dystopia, features, Gilles Deleuze, hyperreality, Lead Story, media landscape, reality TV, science fiction, surveillance, television, William Gibson, YouTube
A post at Buzzfeed has been doing the rounds this week, on how J.G. Ballard “predicted social media in 1977″. According to Buzzfeed, “he made this uncanny observation in a Vogue essay”. Here’s Simon Sellars’ response, in text excerpted from his forthcoming book Applied Ballardianism, about life through a Ballardian lens. Read on for Ballard’s disturbing warning about the dangers that await when we have the capacity to broadcast “the inside of our heads”…
By
James Pardey •
Feb 26th, 2012 •
Category:
America, Brigid Marlin, deep time, dystopia, Eduardo Paolozzi, entropy, enviro-disaster, inner space, interviews, Lead Story, visual art
David Pelham produced perhaps the most Ballardian images ever to grace the covers of Ballard’s novels, prompted by this brief from the author himself: ‘‘monumental/tombstones/airless thermonuclear landscape/horizons/a zone devoid of time’. Here, Pelham discusses his apocalyptic art with James Pardey.
By
Mike Holliday •
Jul 7th, 2010 •
Category:
advertising, architecture, Bentall Centre, celebrity culture, consumerism, dystopia, fascism, features, Lead Story, media landscape, Salvador Dali, Shanghai, speed & violence, sport, surrealism
Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopian account of consumerism as a type of ’soft fascism’, received lukewarm reviews and suggestions that the author was, perhaps, finally losing his touch. Others were eager to point to parallels between it and events around us: aggressive car commercials, racist behaviour by sports fanatics. In this article, Mike Holliday re-examines Kingdom Come and asks: can we really equate consumerism with fascism?
