By Stephen Barber.
1.
To the Insane
‘The Atrocity Exhibition‘s original dedication should have been “To the insane.” I owe them everything.'(1)
In the mid-1960s, J.G. Ballard intensified a process, already a preoccupation of his earlier work, by which his fiction underwent condensation, narrative compacting, and insurgence into visual arts forms. That process generated a series of image/text works, the Advertiser’s Announcements, which he published on the back-covers of issues of Ambit magazine between 1967 and 1971, and formed exploratory test-zones towards his most exhaustive experiment in condensed fiction, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). In Ballard’s short fiction, that process also involved the appropriation of pre-existent medical reports, on such subjects as interventions on sexual organs, in which Ballard restricted himself to the insertion of the names of prominent actresses and public figures, or rearranged and accentuated elements of the sparse medical narratives. In many ways, that process of experimentation with fiction, as the systematic reduction of text to its core obsessions, was undertaken through the transformation of text into image, in which text is rendered so dense, and subjected to such pressure, that it mutates into image. Image, in turn, is exacerbated to the maximal degree, with all emotional aspects rigorously excised, with the result that the narrated image abruptly oscillates from pressurised reduction to maximal, excessive expansion, and its relationship with ocular scrutiny finally disintegrates or combusts, erasing all recognisable parameters. ‘This magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognisable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition‘, as William Burroughs wrote in his introduction to the book. An insane text, with the capacity to mutate into image, is the only form able to project Ballard’s wasteland-cityscapes, abandoned cinemas, motorways and mental hospitals, all populated exclusively by the terminally insane. That unsustainable strain of condensation in Ballard’s writing was released by 1973 with Crash, but by a final aberration, it returned to his work in the notebook form of his final fiction project, World Versus America, from around 2005, when the contemporary world has become a global insane asylum of arbitrary reversals and compulsions, and a European coalition of America’s former allies must now unite to destroy it, using terrorist strategies, as the only means to annul its irrepressible neo-colonial manias.
To condense the projection of reality to an obsessional or psychotic core always resonates with the art works and textual writings of the insane. Condensation generates an intensity and an immediacy which concurrently negate the banal and superfluous; as such, that process will also pivot at the boundary with hallucination or incoherence (like the Surrealist poetry which Ballard admired), but also instils itself with grandiosity, myth and velocity. When Ballard retrospectively assigned the dedication of The Atrocity Exhibition to ‘the insane’, for the book’s 1984 RE/Search edition, he also intimated his own direction as a writer in the book’s era, heading into a salutary proximity to psychotic zones (and their imageries), but stopping a moment before immersal and engulfment. All ‘insane’ writing and visual art is poised at that volatile precipice (otherwise, insane writers and artists would transmit only silences, voids or screams) and indicates the mutability of definitions of insanity.
In 1966, at the onset of the process of experimentation which generated the Advertiser’s Announcements, The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, Ballard interrogated his own aims and what his work would ‘gain’ through reduction and concentration: ‘In The Terminal Beach the elements of the sequential narrative had been almost completely eliminated. It occurred to me that one could carry this to its logical conclusion, and a recent group of stories [for The Atrocity Exhibition] show some of the results. Apart from anything else, this new narrative technique seems to show a tremendous gain in the density of ideas and images. In fact, I regard each of them as a complete novel’.(2) The disintegration of sequence is a preoccupation that had also been pivotal to the first photographs of human figures and animals in motion. On The Atrocity Exhibition’s first page, Travis assembles his set of ‘terminal documents’ which include ‘Chronograms‘ by the French scientist and photographer Étienne-Jules Marey; along with his English collaborator of the early 1880s, Eadweard Muybridge, Marey had instigated the process by which sequences of human movements are seized and registered through the photographic image (Muybridge, in his proto-filmic innovations, used banks of twenty or more cameras to amass multiple but separate images, while Marey deployed a single ‘photographic gun’ able to expose his figures near-simultaneously on the same surface, as though an image were integrally an assassination document). In order to anatomise human movement, a process of elimination necessarily took place: all continuous movements between those registered in the split-second images vanished, with the result that, in the images of Muybridge and Marey, the human body often appears subject to convulsions, facial gapings and rictus, sexually-resonant limb-spasms and oscillations – the accentuated gestural movements which fascinated Francis Bacon in his re-workings of Muybridge’s images (some of which were photographic sequences of insane-asylum patients).
In his emphasis on the perceived ‘tremendous gain in the density of ideas and images’ to be extracted from his work on condensed fictions, Ballard evokes the contradictory proliferations that result from reduction and elimination. Much of the Surrealist art which attracted Ballard, especially the work of Max Ernst (such as The Robing of the Bride, 1940, and other works whose titles are incorporated into The Atrocity Exhibition), possesses a dynamic of infinite proliferation, in which all space on the canvas must be excessively filled, to its maximum density. But in order to achieve that spatial excess and heighten the ‘dense’ mystery of figures such as those of Ernst, all conceptions of the coherent depiction of space and time must be jettisoned; Surrealist film, too, notably with Buñuel and DalÃ’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) occupies its own duration through the projection of ellipses, erasures and vanishings, often those marked with violence, upon the eye or body. Across The Atrocity Exhibition and Surrealist film, the fragments which remain from a process of violent elimination are saturated with a concentrational amalgam of image and text, with a distinctive ocular dynamic.
Even when his work is dedicated to the insane, and approaches their terrain, Ballard still conceives of the ‘logical’ process of condensation which takes him there in resolutely positive terms: his gain will be ‘tremendous’. The first sentence of The Atrocity Exhibition evokes the exhibition of art works by the ‘long-incarcerated patients’ of the research-centre or insane-asylum where Travis and Nathan conduct their work. To amass or exhibit the work of the insane (and to transform that work’s obsessions, into books, films or art works which inhabit a world beyond the asylum, as Ballard and innumerable others have done) possesses a lengthy history, from Hans Prinzhorn‘s collection of the early 1920s to large-scale ‘art brut’ and ‘outsider art’ exhibitions of the postwar and contemporary periods. Most notably, the Austrian radical psychiatrist, Leo Navratil, physically ‘collected’ insane artists as well as exhibiting their works, by grouping them together to live at his ‘artists’ house’ initiative in the grounds of the vast psychiatric institution at Klosterneuberg, near Vienna, enabling that grouping of the (male) insane, whose paintings and drawings envisioned sexual compulsions and global apocalypse with the same unerring concentration as the patients of Ballard’s asylum, to be exhibited together to the asylum’s visitors – though each patient carried his own particular narrative (as combatants in scorched-earth conflicts such as Stalingrad, just as Ballard’s figures are the ex-combatants of Vietnam, mind-destroying consumerism or car-crash duels), in a parallel way to that in which Ballard’s fragments, seized at the intensively hallucinated moments between gaps of elimination, each formed, as he noted, ‘a complete novel’ in its own right: one proliferating to infinity.
Ballard eliminated or discarded almost all of the manuscript materials relating to The Atrocity Exhibition; in the archive of his work from that era, conserved after his death at the British Library in London, almost all that he allowed to survive was his own collection of the Advertiser’s Announcements, together with a single postcard from Dealey Plaza and a short text, written in 2008, at the end of his life, in which he reflects back on the era of the book’s writing and the ‘overheated realm’ it inhabits, focusing especially on the figure of Ronald Reagan: ‘At the time, 1967, Reagan seemed a vital key to what was going wrong, both with America and the world-wide media landscapes.'(3) By 2008, the other ‘key’ figure in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ralph Nader – author of the polemical car-safety book Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) whose overturning precipitated Crash, and still a young anti-corporate activist at the time of Ballard’s preoccupation with him – had himself made numerous attempts to seize the American presidency, but failed, impeded by the inability of the American population to conceive him filmically, as they effortlessly had with Reagan. The survival in Ballard’s archive of his Advertiser’s Announcements, with their particular ‘density of ideas and images’, intimates their seminal role in the generation of his condensed fiction, and that fiction’s transmutatory infiltration into the domain of the visual image and of London’s late-1960s visual arts culture. The documents’ archivist, Chris Beckett, places the absence of materials relating to The Atrocity Exhibition within the dynamics of self-erasure projected by Ballard’s archive: ‘Considerably more than a brief blur, there is nonetheless a self-effacing and reductive character to Ballard’s papers at the British Library: the archive is concentrated upon the successive drafts of his novels in manuscript and in typescript. Unfortunately, the draft material that has survived does not extend to Ballard’s many short stories… The absence of short fiction in the archive extends to The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), the discontinuous narrative – or cluster of interfolded narratives – that for some critics has a greater claim than Empire of the Sun to be considered Ballard’s key work.'(4)
2.
Ballard’s Advertiser’s Announcements
‘Gesturing Catherine Austin into the chair beside his desk, Dr Nathan studied the elegant and mysterious advertisements which had appeared that afternoon in the pages of Vogue and Paris-Match… He rapped the magazines with his cigarette case. ”These images are fragments in a terminal moraine left behind by your passage through consciousness.”'(5)
Ballard’s sequence of Advertiser’s Announcements traverse art, text, and film. They form art for the globally insane; literary anti-therapies that suture unwriteable text by condensation, but simultaneously also open-up and expose the development of The Atrocity Exhibition into its form as a book; and double-edged ‘treatments’ too in a filmic sense, dually announcements (posters or billboards, like those positioned outside cinemas or on the motorways leading towards them) prefiguring impossible films that consist of only one image and are therefore the concentrated residue of an image-sequence from which all else has been eliminated, and also films that ‘treat’ ocular maladies – with the necessary severity of Buñuel wielding his razor at the opening of Un Chien Andalou – with a volatile concoction of image and text. Ballard’s texts for the first, third and fourth of the five ‘announcements’ filmically emphasise that they are ‘A J.G. BALLARD PRODUCTION’, as though only the first and last movements in any creative process possess any relevance, and the advertised film-product Homage to Claire Churchill had undergone a jump-cut directly from its initiatory treatment to its final ‘credits’ and the assignation of the film’s powerful ownership, without the actual making of the superfluous film itself. Ballard’s persistent highlighting in The Atrocity Exhibition of the figure of Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas resident who accidentally seized the instant of the Kennedy assassination in the images of his Bell & Howell ‘Zoomatic’ super-8 camera’s Kodachrome colour celluloid frames – those isolated images (above all, frame 313, in which Kennedy’s head is seen to explode) endlessly analysed and conspiratorially re-imagined, while the rest of Zapruder’s extensive amateur film-oeuvre was consigned to oblivion – indicates Ballard’s film-casting imperatives, and the significance of revelatory filmic residues, highlighted between eliminations or voids, in the conception of the Advertiser’s Announcements.
In Ballard’s own archive of The Atrocity Exhibition era, what survives are the detached covers – and in only one case, an entire copy – of the issues of the literary/arts magazine Ambit that published the Advertiser’s Announcements; in most cases, Ballard has simply torn-out or scissored-away his work from the rest of the magazine’s contents, so they are annulled from his archive, which is reduced to a focus on five image/text works. Ballard had worked briefly as a young man, in the early 1950s, as an advertising copyrighter, and his short stories, in particular, manifest an ongoing engagement with urban or motorway-edge billboards, hoardings, screens and posters – within which the dynamics of speed and vision are always urgently present, with the advertisement often passed-by too rapidly for any text to be assimilated by the eye (before vision shifts focus to the next instance in the sequence), so that the presence of text itself is rendered into an enigmatic blur or fragment, as with the fragments from The Atrocity Exhibition incorporated (in amended or expanded form) into Ballard’s Advertiser’s Announcements project. Ballard noted that, despite being an editor of Ambit, he had paid the magazine’s commercial advertising rate (which, as its editorial information indicates, was a negligible one) for the publication of his ‘announcements’, had published them also in European experimental literary/arts magazines (though no trace of those further publications subsists in his archive), and had envisioned their expansive publication into global mass-media magazines such as Vogue and Paris-Match, if the advertiser’s costs had not been prohibitive.
Homage to Claire Churchill, incorporating text-in-progress towards The Atrocity Exhibition, appeared in Ambit’s issue 32 in 1967; Ballard’s copy of the work is cut from the rest of the magazine, and he signed the back of the detached page in blue ink, with his surname, explicitly positioning it as an art-work whose unique status required the inscription of his signature. The Angle Between Two Walls, with its image-content drawn from a still from Alone (1963) by the London-based American experimental filmmaker Steve Dwoskin and its textual content again aligned to The Atrocity Exhibition, appeared in Ambit’s issue 33 in 1967; again, Ballard has detached his contribution from the magazine. A Neural Interval uses an image assigned in the work’s textual elements to ‘Collection: Eduardo Paolozzi’ but later remembered by Ballard, in an interview with RE/Search journal, as being sourced from a bondage fetish-magazine.(6)The work’s relationship to the development of The Atrocity Exhibition is explicitly highlighted by the presence in the same issue of the magazine (Ambit issue 36, 1968) of an entirely textual work-in-progress extract from the book; even so, Ballard has again detached his Advertiser’s Announcement from the rest of the magazine itself. Placental Insufficiency, published in Ambit issue 45 after a break of two years, in 1970 – the year of publication of The Atrocity Exhibition – draws its visual element from a photograph by Les Krims, then a young and relatively little-known American photographer, and its prominent textual content (taking up a greater part of the page’s surface than in the other four works, but impeded by its printing in white text on a partly white background) from The Atrocity Exhibition; again, in Ballard’s own copy, the work is detached from the magazine. The final Advertiser’s Announcement, published in Ambit issue 46 in 1971 and with one of its textual elements interposing the name of a car (a Ford ‘Zepyhr V6’) between those of the unaware subject (‘Claire’) and the photographer (‘J.G. Ballard’), is the only one in Ballard’s archive to remain attached to the entire magazine; again, its textual content is drawn from The Atrocity Exhibition. Each variant, prefiguration or adapted fragment from that book, across the five ‘announcements’, forms an autonomous art work in its own right, just as Ballard expansively conceived of the elimination-enhanced publications of work-in-progress elements of The Atrocity Exhibition (and other texts of that era) as ‘complete’ novels in themselves. For that final work, at the top-left of the page, Ballard also incorporates the binding title for his sequence of isolated works: ‘Advertiser’s Announcement‘.(7)
Ballard originally devised the entirety of The Atrocity Exhibition as a large-format visual project, similar in conception to an experimental art catalogue, collaged to incorporate documentary film images and medical documents alongside the textual content, and the Advertiser’s Announcements project forms a tangential detritus of that ambition. The art work of the classified-insane, such as that of August Walla and Henry Darger, demonstrates that no distinction can ever be made between visual and textual production; when Ballard acknowledges that he owes ‘everything’ to the insane, that debt encompasses the exemplar of ‘logical’ psychotic traversals across creative processes, along with more familiar debts to the insane such as corporeal mutation, hallucination, sexual delirium and apocalyptic obsession. Figures more dominantly associated with the production of fiction or essays who abruptly ‘announced’ themselves as artists, whether introducing textual elements into their art works or not, often undertook that aberrant expansion under the influence of drugs, as with Henri Michaux’s mescaline-induced preoccupation with proliferating projections of the human face. Ballard’s preferred Surrealist artists, such as Dalà and Hans Bellmer, were also prolific writers, or perceived no disjuncture between text and image alongside more pressing and profound disjunctures within the human body and ocular perception.
Ballard’s Advertiser’s Announcements are simultaneously low-technology and non-professional art (he had to pay for his art works to be made public, and they possess resolutely hand-made and idiosyncratic dimensions, like pages from the scrapbooks of Muybridge and Tatsumi Hijikata) and also form seminal artefacts that anatomise his preoccupations with raw sophistication, as in the exposures of Zapruder’s amateur camera-work which irresistibly distilled assassination. They possess a condensed open-endedness which is also that of The Atrocity Exhibition, as a sequence of viral art-works that could prolong itself indefinitely (to be displayed in a book, or as a film of stilled images, like Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jete é, which Ballard admired, or through an undifferentiated amalgam of all media), but they are also abandoned work – Ballard’s visual experiments of 1967-71, including his ‘Jim Ballard: Crashed Cars’ exhibition of April 1970,, are terminal ones, pre-instilled with their own eradication and elimination (as a ‘logical conclusion’).
3.
Ballard’s Dangers: World Versus America
”’There are dangers,” he continues. ”There is this deadening of the human sensibility. You go to somewhere like Kingston-on-Thames… that is very close to a modern hell. Go to the Bentall Centre” – he pronounces the name as someone might say Auschwitz-Birkenau – ”and you see these huge galleries with people wandering around…”’.(8)
Ballard’s ‘dangers’ of the final phase of his work intersect in many ways with those he had perceived in the second half of the 1960s, in the era of The Atrocity Exhibition and its Advertiser’s Announcements, in proliferating American media-landscapes and their projections, and in the engulfing neo-colonial warfare epitomised by American intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 70s. A number of Ballard’s short stories, across the intervening decades, propose a situation in which a lengthy military or cultural conflict flares in which America and its manifestations form the ‘enemy’. For Ballard, in the final years of his work, homogenising corporate consumerism constitutes a danger as malevolent as more aggressive and tangible incursions, since it annuls and deadens imagination and subversion. The history of consumerism is the history of a petrifying insanity, always the exact contrary to the active insanity to which Ballard owes ‘everything’. Consumerism appears almost always American in origin for Ballard, resonating with his Shanghai childhood of vast, luxurious cars and extravagantly illustrated magazines dispatched to alien landscapes from the USA, and linked to a warfare-enhanced invasion of the European imagination. That attribution of the USA as the origin of dual invasive strategies of consumerism and neo-colonial warfare, focused on negation, formed a prominent locus of 1960s and 70s art and film (in Wim Wenders’ 1976 film Kings of the Road, the itinerant characters, born at the Second World War’s end and now struggling to keep cinematic culture alive by repairing its last film-projectors in the warfare-created wasteland between West and East Germany, analyse how America has ‘colonised our subconscious’); that meshing of consumerism and neo-colonial warfare also possesses its theoretical underpinning, in widely different idioms, in French philosophy – notably that of Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Paul Virilio – which directly impacted on Ballard’s work, particularly through Baudrillard’s essay Ballard’s Crash (1976) and Ballard’s own lauding of Baudrillard’s America (1986). Ballard’s last published novel, Kingdom Come, located principally in a suburban multi-levelled atrium shopping-mall inspired by the Bentall Centre in Kingston-on-Thames – ‘a town I hate’, as Ballard emphasised, and dangerously close to his home in Shepperton – had interrogated those dynamics of an irresistible, ocularly-propelled consumerism, which insurges into warfare within the miniaturised zonal-city of the mall; in interviews around the book’s publication, Ballard recounted his own visit to the Bentall Centre, and how his eyes and body were unwillingly meshed into the mall’s spatial compulsions: ‘I thought, Jesus, get out fast.'(9)
On the completion of his work on Kingdom Come, Ballard formulated a new project, World Versus America, which envisioned a more direct confrontation of his preoccupations with American military-based neo-colonial power (now, following the aerial attacks on American targets on 11 September, 2001, inextricably meshed with the disputed dynamics of terrorism) and its all-engulfing, image-driven consumerism – and also reactivated preoccupations which had been seminal to The Atrocity Exhibition, such as the assassination of the American President. World Versus America is an abandoned work, existing solely in the form of five notebooks and taken no further, and its concentrated, fragmentary formulation resonates with the condensed fictions with which Ballard had experimented in the second half of the 1960s (the British Library’s cataloguing of Ballard’s archive dates the notebooks to around 2005, and one possible sequence of events is that Ballard, on learning of his terminal illness, decided to pursue his final, autobiographical work, Miracles of Life, 2008, in preference over World Versus America). Ballard intended to incorporate into the project elements drawn from television news, propaganda films, internet clips and magazine articles, in a way that recalls the collaging techniques of The Atrocity Exhibition and its accompanying art works; one of his formulations of the novel’s narrative was that it would take the form of ‘a series of testimonies’. And following on from the feature-films made of Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and Crash (both mentioned in the project’s notebooks), he already explicitly envisaged World Versus America as a filmic project, that could even transmutate from the form of a novel into that of a film-script, and as a result, it resonates too, in its process of origination, with the filmic conception of The Atrocity Exhibition and its projections into the Advertiser’s Announcements.
The weapons at Ballard’s disposal for his last-ditch assault on the obliterating dynamics of America’s neo-colonial and media-instilled corporate power formed slight ones: five mass-produced, spiral-bound notebooks (many pages from which have evidently been torn-out for other purposes), still adhered with stickers from ‘The Card Centre, Shepperton’; four of the notebook were priced at 80p each, alongside a more luxurious, gold-coloured one, the focus of Ballard’s principal work on the project, that cost 99p. Ballard’s densely notational and fragmentary elements occupy only part of the notebooks’ available space (in one notebook, only two pages are used, leaving the remainder of the surfaces blank). The back cover of one notebook is signed, ‘JGB’, as with the single signed reverse-side of one of Ballard’s Advertiser’s Announcements. All work on World Versus America was done by hand, mostly in blue biro with some black-biro and red-biro passages, apart from one typewritten sheet of paper which concisely summarises the project in the context of its eventual publication and, in its condensed and film-inflected form, constitutes a terminal treatment. In his essay on the Ballard archive, its curator Chris Beckett describes those materials: ‘The archive includes a set of five undated notepads containing outline ideas for a novel that was not to be written, about a world war referred to as WVA, or World Versus America. Post-Iraq, a coalition of World forces has reached the end of its diplomatic patience with America’s destabilising ‘’imperial reach” and initiates global conflict by making a pre-emptive strike. Ballard summarises: ‘’A backstory would describe the US imperial reach & attacks on other countries – its threats, use of force etc. The events that have brought a sense of despair to its last allies, & the decision to attack the US before it is too late.”'(10)
In its formulation within Ballard’s five notebooks, World Versus America presents figures, rather than characters; he evidently intended to develop a range of characters with direct involvements and commitments, to propel the novel’s expansive and intricate narrative, but in the project’s curtailed notebook formulation, his figures remain mysterious ciphers, unable to enter a narrative of prefigured erasure (in which America ‘effectively destroys itself – a chain reaction begins’), thereby evoking the figures of Xero, Kline and Coma, poised at the peripheries of half-built or derelict motorways in The Atrocity Exhibition. The figure who assassinates the American President, in the envisaged book’s final part, forms the ‘central character’, but remains hidden and disguised (for the act of assassination, he may dress as a Disneyland attendant in a Mickey Mouse costume). The targets and means for European terrorist attacks on America form far more closely delineated presences; Ballard creates lists of those targets, sub-dividing them into primary and ‘miscellaneous’ categories and using an intricate system of red-ink ticks and triple asterisks, cross-referenced across the notebooks, for such destructive means as ‘suicide attacks’ and ‘suicide plane attacks’, and to separate ‘iconic’ targets such as ‘Hollywood Signs and Studios’ from such lesser targets as ‘Big Macs, Holiday Inns, etc’.
Ballard positions his narrative’s terrorist war against America’s maleficent neo-colonial and consumerist dangers as a deadly serious one, with satirical elements, but no element of irony; the focus of the book’s planning is on the contemporary moment, but its timeframe extends backwards across seven decades, to seminal historical exemplars such as Vietnam and the Second World War. In his plan for the book and its ending, America will be approached: ‘as if the country was as dangerous as Nazi Germany or the Stalinist S.U. [Soviet Union]. Not an ironic and ambiguous ending. Given that most people’s feelings are broadly admiring of the US, taking it as the enemy (like a book written by a Viet Cong) would be all the more startling. An ironic ending would weaken it… Sept 11 suggests a psychological approach striking at the US’s main weaknesses – its sentimentality, religiosity, adolescence…’.The end-phase of the conflict, and America’s elimination, will itself form an atrocity exhibition: ‘frenzied and brutal’.
Ballard also envisaged his potential reader’s experience of World Versus America in a way that evokes (backwards and forwards across time) the emotionless but profound transits, disorders and revelations that a reading of The Atrocity Exhibition may precipitate. The planned novel’s condensed structure would be that of: ‘short chapters, almost diary-like, each seeing events from point of view of one of say 6-10 characters (it’s probably not so vital here to involve reader emotionally, since the story is so strong and strange)’.(11) The curtailment of World Versus America itself forms a ‘strong and strange’ presence that intensifies its residues, and resonates too with the anti-narrational curtailments of The Atrocity Exhibition, on Lee Harvey Oswald’s starting gun, and the Advertiser’s Announcements, on Claire Churchill’s seaweed-inscribed body, and on ‘transits of touch and feeling, as serene as the movements of a dune’.
Notes
1. Annotations, The Atrocity Exhibition, RE/Search, San Francisco, 1990, p.9.
2. ‘Notes from Nowhere: Comments on Work in Progress’, New Worlds, no.167, London, 1966, pp.147-51.
3. Typescript, 2008, in the J.G. Ballard collection, British Library, London.
4. Chris Beckett, ‘The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J.G. Ballard at the British Library’, The Electronic British Library Journal, London, 2011, p.8.
5. The Atrocity Exhibition, Panther, London, 1979, pp.58-59.
6. Interview with V. Vale, RE/Search, issue 8/9, San Francisco, 1984, p.147.
7. Advertiser’s Announcements, 1967-71, in the J.G. Ballard collection, British Library, London.
8. ‘The Shopping Mall Psychopath’, interview by Thomas Sutcliffe, The Independent, London, 14 September 2000, p.7.
9. ‘From Here to Dystopia’, interview by Mick Brown, The Telegraph (magazine), London, 2 September 2006, pp.16-22.
10. Chris Beckett, ‘The Progress of the Text: The Papers of J.G. Ballard at the British Library’, p.15.
11. All quotations from the World Versus America project are from the notebooks in the J.G. Ballard collection, British Library, London.
I’m grateful to Chris Beckett at the British Library for his guidance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Barber has been hailed as “the most dangerous man in Britain” by The Independent. The Times has called his work “brilliant, profound and provocative”. He is a noted cultural historian and author of many acclaimed books. His writing has won many awards and been translated into Japanese, French, German and Italian. Formerly Professor of Digital Media at the University of Tokyo, he is currently Professor of Media Arts at Kingston University.
