Atrocity Exhibition: Contextual Research

I am teaming up with Tom Hallgarten for the short film project. After reading a handful of fiction book titles from the library, we have decided to make an animation based on a loose interpretation of the key themes and atmosphere in The Atrocity Exhibition, an experimental novel by J.G. Ballard.

The novel:

In the introduction of the novel, Ballard (2001) suggest the reader to "simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eyes".

Unlike conventional novels, the dream-like, absurd linked stories of the main character who goes by different names - that begins with the letter 'T' - over the chapters is a form of investigation around the theme of neo-liberal media culture emerging in post-war 1960s. In the book, Ballard connotes an overarching idea that the process of emancipating oneself from the media propaganda is simultaneously dehumanising.

This is evidenced by the thematic rendition of atrocities are vividly described in the novel:

• Juxtaposition of urban and rural environments, and also abstraction of reality into geometrical planes.
• Hypersexualisation of mass media: celebrities and politicians as sex icons.
• Bombardment of advertisement billboards with photo-montage and newsreels of the Vietnam war, Reagan government and the assassination of JFK leading to future conspiracies of WW III.
• Absurd obsession with car crash as psychosexual fetish; reconceptualisation of the human bodies by machines. 

About the author:
J.G. Ballard owns a skeptical perspective of the impact from media culture to the proletarian society from watching television and magazines (Time, Life and Look).

• studied medicine - fascination with medical procedures.
• Decided to pursue writing (dystopian and absurd) sci-fi books; investigated and created a sort of early warning system by predicting future from past and present experience.
• Experienced war first hand when he was a teenage boy when the Japanese Army occupies Shanghai.
• War experience leaves him with skeptical eye to what is going on in his surroundings. 
• took an interest in the strange psychology of tormented people.
• His writings questions whether we are much different people from the civilised human beings we imagine ourselves to be.
• Observes big changes in post-war era England: believes that reality is a stage set; could be easily dismantled overnight.

What is the Ballardian aesthetic?

Project for a New Novel (1958) by J.G. Ballard:

Brutalist architectures:

Surrealist Paintings (e.g. Max ernst, Dali, Bellmer, Francis Bacon)

A still from David Cronenberg's screen adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Crash (1996):

Sources:

• http://www.ballardian.com/
• Sellars, S. (2012) Extreme Metaphor: Interviews with J.G. Ballard 1967-2008, London: Fourth Estate/HarperCollins
• Ballard, J. (2014[1970]) The Atrocity Exhibition, London: Fourth Estate/HarperCollins