J.G. Ballard’s networking explanation of the world
I was reading the announcement of J.G. Ballard’s exhibition at the CCCB in Barcelona “Autopsy of the new millenium” to run from July, 22, and I found myself watching the extraordinary videos on J.G. Ballard’s South Bank Show on YouTube. These are three chapters of a unique interview to this excellent science-fiction writer that go along his life and his novels and writings.
Listening to Basllard explaining his beliefs and what where his first dramatic experiences in life, under the Second World War, when he was in Shanghai, where he was born, I felt like overloaded with information and sensations. I asked myself how a man can survive after having been living so intensively every moment of the history. which he had to translate into a science-fiction novels and stories where he could overcome his internal nightmares like he had done with a Psychiatrist.
What I mean is that J.G. Ballard is a man that getting born in Shanghai, at that time a city melting pot of cultures and a city ready to disappear under bombs and devastation, was fortunate to be in a node of the big network of history that more than 50 years later is still in the centre of most dynamic changes. Ballard’s interpretation of most outstanding events in modern history become part of a networked interpretation of reality, so that he uses science-fiction to explain what really is happening to our society. Ballard is knitting a network and constructing a web that may upset many sceptics or provoke scandal to innocents, but he throws in our eyes the reality of man kind: violence, boredom, sex, passion and consumerism.
Networks are part of his intellectual construction by linking people with facts and showing a static condition of our own limitations as human beings.
If you had no chance to see these chapters of South Bank Show on TV, I invite you to watch them now. Just start with this first chapter.
