Chit-Chat

So going back a lil bit I gave a talk on J.G Ballard, examining how High-Rise can be used a critique of modern living. This was part of the Alternative Worlds series hosted by the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.

http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/events/seminars/alternative-worlds.html

Well this is hopefully now going to be developed into a book featuring chapters by all the speakers, arriving on your shelf late 2012. To keep you going til then here's a little taster....



JG Ballard’s High-Rise as a critique of modern living.

JG Ballard’s writing has often been seen as indicative of our society, examining
our psychology and environment. This paper therefore aims to use Ballard as a
way of understanding our relationship with architecture and technology.

It will focus on JG Ballard’s 1975 book High-Rise, which explores the resident’s
changing psychology and relationship with the architecture and technology.
I will examine this relationship in terms of the response to technology, its
alienating affect, the isolation and internalisation caused by the architecture and
the inter-relationship between the mind, the body and the environment.

Ballard explores the architecture and technology not as the reason for the
change in the resident’s thoughts and actions but sees them as the medium
for a more free psychological expression. Ballard’s writing will be compared
to existing realities and investigations into society and psychology, in order
to determine the relevance of his writing and how we can use it to better
understand the society we live in.

Through this examination this paper hopes to reveal the ways in which Ballard
has looked at technology, architecture and society and the relationship between
them. Also how Ballard’s writing is relevant and reflective of society, taking his
hyper-real situations and understanding what they may say about human reality.
To this end the question being posed is: How is JG Ballard’s High-Rise reflective
of humanity’s relationship to technology and architecture?