Black Box Text

[Posting here the full text of a piece originally written in 2013 for the Literature / Technology / Media hub at the University of Cambridge]

Amongst volumes on Dali, Francis Bacon and Helmut Newton, J.G. Ballard’s library also contained The Black Box (1984) edited by Malcolm MacPherson. The book is a collection of transcripts taken from the Flight Data Recorders of aeroplanes involved in “air disasters”.  These ‘black boxes’, consist of a central recording medium (first wire, then tape, now currently digital matter) sealed in a steel outer casing that is robust enough to survive high impact, intense heat and immersion in water. The devices are typically installed into a plane’s tail assembly in order to record in-flight instrument data and cockpit dialogue. In the event of a crash the units can, in theory, be recovered intact from the wreckage in order to reconstruct the sequence of events – computational and conversational – that preceded the accident. 

The Flight Data Recorder has been an industry standard since 1960. Versions have been in use since 1939 but mainly in the aircraft research industry. It was first outlined for use in civilian aviation with a specific post-crash application in 1954 by David Warren, an aeronautical researcher at the Australian Defense Department. His paper, “A Device for Assisting Investigation into Aircraft Accidents” streamlined the problematic photographic functionality of previous models and gave rise to the 1957 prototype, the Flight Memory Unit. At this point in the object’s history, ‘black box’ can be revealed as something of a misnomer: the devices were designed to be, and have remained, bright orange to facilitate ease of identification and retrieval on the ground. The term seems to have stuck due to journalistic shorthand and possibly as a residue of its initial photographic incarnation. Early models were essentially small, sealed darkrooms not designed with crash salvage in mind.

Although technically imprecise, ‘black box’ nevertheless carries accuracy as regards the imaginative significance invested in the device. In circuit design, ‘black box’ describes a component that is understood not on the basis of its mechanism but in relation to its input, output and processional characteristics, the manner in which the input changes as a result of its transfer through the device. Similarly, the Flight Data Recorder often occupies the interstitial position common to the symbolic reception of many recording devices: it hovers as an invisible mediator somewhere between operation and content. Frequently brandished for the press at the edge of an accident zone, the recorder is often taken as a talismanic marker that signals not the start of an analysis but the completion of an investigation. A solid state amongst the residue of the plane, the black box functions as a perfect synecdoche: one surviving part that at a human and material level, can reassemble the disintegrated whole. Once it is found, the external reportage can withdraw as the public narrative of the plane crash has, in a sense, come to an end. 


John Varley’s short story ‘Air Raid’ (1977) and later novel Millennium (1983) are both built upon this symbolism of holistic resurrection. In each, a black box is recovered containing a recording that analeptically opens out at an exponential rate. It narrativizes the crash central to each text, as well as a panoramic scenario of time travel and impending catastrophe. Varley’s box is a narrative engine that quickly disappears under the weight of its contained significance. For Ballard, his attraction to the device is also connected to its narrative results. Writing in a 1998 review of MacPherson’s second edition, he explains that his fascination with the transcripts lies in their presentation of slowly accumulating decline:

What stands out […] is how quietly catastrophe creeps up on its victims. A gradual fall in hydraulic pressure, an unexplained loss of fuel, a hint of smoke in a lavatory, are noted half an hour before the looming crisis.

However, what is also emphasised in Ballard’s account is the informational poverty that the neutral ear of the recorder necessarily retains. As Iain Sinclair noted when describing the myth of Ballard’s own archive, ‘nothing intimate survive(s)’:

[…] the transcripts convey only the sketchiest impression of the atmosphere in a stricken aircraft as the captain and crew wrestle with their controls. While one crippled system collapses on another, horns blare, lights flash and recorded voices shout: "Pull up! Pull up!"

Yet no one panics. Even in the final moments, as the doomed aircraft heads towards the ground at 400 miles per hour, only a stoical regret is sounded, like the simple comment, "We're dead", made by the co-pilot of a Lockheed cargo plane in the seconds before the end.

That final announcement encapsulates the (im) possibility of the black box. Along with examples such as Edison’s spiritualist hopes for his phonograph and Konstantin Raudive’s fascination with Electronic Voice Phenomena, the imaginative economy of the Flight Data Recorder helps to maintain the post-mortem fantasy associated with recording media. It seems to work against annihilation by preserving voice and experience in the aftermath of their destruction. And yet, what Ballard highlights is the skeletal, denotation of ‘the end’. It exists and can, of course, only exist as a statement of an impending event rather than a survival of the event itself. The investigative specificity of the Flight Data Recorder coupled with the nature of its most significant material foregrounds the operational reality that underpins the projected phantasy:  a capacity for re-play rather than mediumship.

The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

 

I was very happy to been invited to act as co-editor on the recent essay volume for Bloomsbury, The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction (2018). The book is part of the ongoing Decades series and brought together wide range of excellent essays dealing with various aspects of 1960s fiction. Topics included gay fiction, youth cultures, postcolonial writing, science fiction and experimental writing. I wrote on J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and 'The End of the Sixties'. My thanks to fellow editors Philip Tew and Melanie Seddon. The book is available now and Nick Hubble has written a guest blog post over at the Bloomsbury Literary Studies site about it and the previous volume in the series on the 1950s.

The Enormous Room

Recently I took part in the Anglia Ruskin conference, J. G. Ballard and the Sciences. Organised by Jeanette Baxter and featuring Christopher Priest, Fay Ballard and a range of excellent international speakers, the event was a really successful investigation of the intersections between Ballard's writing and parallel fields of investigation. I spoke about Ballard and sensory deprivation, a topic I've been interested in for a while. It was good to outline these ideas and also to reflect further on some of my recent experiences in floatation tanks: I'm all in favour of experimenting on the self, as it were. My thanks to Jeanette Baxter for including me on the programme. A big shout out should also go to the good people at Cambridge's Art of Float: if you want to experience the type of things John C. Lily and Paddy Chayefsky were talking about, check them out.

I've added my abstract for the talk below. The title comes from e.e. cummings' account of imprisonment, The Enormous Room (1922), a useful point of comparison with Ballard's 'The Enormous Space' (1989).

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The Enormous Room: J.G. Ballard and Sensory Deprivation

In The Drowned World (1962), the ecological regression of the natural landscape to a Neo-Triassic state prompts a similar “archeopsychic” shift in human psychology. Consistent with Ballard’s other post-apocalyptic scenarios, access to these “ghostly deltas” of inner space is welcomed by the novel’s characters, particularly the biologist Robert Kerans.

For John Baxter the “neuronic odyssey” of The Drowned World echoes the work of neurophysiologist John C. Lilly who, from 1954 onwards, conducted a series of sensory deprivation experiments using enclosed floatation tanks. As Lilly would go on to describe in The Centre of the Cyclone (1972) sensory deprivation prompted “mystical states” and allegedly enabled him to undergo a regressive anamnesis that permitted access to deep genetic memory. Lilly’s work paralleled that of psychologist Donald Hebb at Canada’s McGill University. Commissioned by the US Air Force, Hebb used dark, sound-proof isolation chambers to simulate the withdrawal of sensory stimuli from test subjects. Colin Wilson’s novel The Black Room (1971) drew on the McGill experiments whilst Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States (1978) took the visionary aspects of Lilly’s work as its basis.

In the case of Ballard, language and imagery redolent of this field of post-war experimentation appears across his career, not just in The Drowned World but also short stories such as ‘Manhole ’69’ (1957), ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964) and ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989). In each case the lack of sensory stimuli results in experiences of spatial, psychological and temporal expansion.  

After unpacking the link between Ballard’s texts and the surrounding context of sensory deprivation, I wish to mark out his thematic difference from the likes of Lilly, Wilson and Chayefsky et al. While they variously connect the experimental process to the discovery of a foundational human essence, Ballard’s narratives plot movements towards the dissolution, negation and reformation of human identity. In examining this representation of men in the process of disappearing, this paper uses the literature of sensory deprivation to interpret Ballard’s predilection for terminal identities framed as transformative states.

Signals from the Future: High Rise Preview Tour

High Rise Live: EV and JR in conversation at the Picturehouse screening
Photo: George Bickers

Last weekend the High Rise preview tour came to the Cambridge Picturehouse. There was to be a special screening plus a post-film Q&A chaired by Evie Salmon. Good stuff. A fortuitous turn of events on the day resulted in me being drafted in to act as the interviewee on the night. I was, of course, more than happy to do this. In fact I was delighted to be asked....

The screening was sold out and after a quick planning conference Evie and I held court on the work of Jeremy Thomas, the unrealized 'ghost' versions of High Rise and hauntological messages from the future. I've added something akin to a transcript below. Many thanks to Evie for the invite and many thanks to the Cambridge Picturehouse for their hospitality. 

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EV: High Rise is being touted, rightly so, as another great film from Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley. We'll talk about the Writer / Director team in a moment. Let's just start though by talking about the film's equally distinctive producer, Jeremy Thomas. How do you think High Rise fits in with the rest of his oeuvre? 

JR: I think it fits very well. In fact I think Jeremy Thomas's signature is all over this. Thomas seems to approach his work as a producer in a manner similar to that of a curator. He seems to commission, as it were, the films he would like to see. He's not unlike the Tony Wilson of independent film. In terms of outlook and attitude, High Rise sits right alongside Thomas's other adaptations of 'difficult', post-1945 works of fiction. He did Naked Lunch with David Cronenberg in 1991 and of course Cronenberg's 'other' J.G. Ballard adaptation Crash in 1996. In 1990 he produced Bernardo Bertolucci's film of The Sheltering Sky (1949) by Paul Bolwes and he also produced David Mackenzie's version of Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam (1954) in 2003. He's done other projects and his portfolio is admirably extensive but there is this consistent return to film projects based on controversial, if not transgressive texts and film projects which help to develop the work of challenging, idiosyncratic directors. On the basis of that modus operandi, doing Ballard's High Rise (1975) with Jump and Wheatley makes complete sense.

Toronto high rise: Cronenberg's Crash (1996) 

Having said that, I would imagine that for Thomas there's quite a degree of personal investment in this particular film. I believe he's held the rights to the novel for the best part of 30 years. There have been at least two other attempts in that time of bringing it to the screen with Thomas as producer. The first was with Nicolas Roeg in the late 1970s. Paul Mayersberg worked on the screenplay after The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Roeg was all set for it before ultimately opting to make Bad Timing (1980), also produced by Thomas. I think Roeg was a good choice for High Rise. Certainly Performance (1970) and Walkabout (1971) both have an emphasis on transformative 'zones' that's not dissimilar to the type of spaces one finds in Ballard. Whatever the reason for it not coming together, let's just pause and imagine what could have been: a version of High Rise by Roeg possibly featuring David Bowie as Royal, Art Garfunkel as Laing and Theresa Russell as Charlotte Melville. I would have liked to have seen that....

The other version I know about was also to have been produced by Thomas with a screenplay by Richard Stanley and directed by Vincenzo Natali. This came up in about 2010. Again, I think this was a very good choice as a creative team. Stanley had dealt with weird events in a tower block in his classic Hardware (1990) and Natali had done brilliant things with ideas of entrapment and enclosure in Cube (1997). A poster emerged for this version and I believe they had opted to re-imagine the novel's London high-rise as the 'Elysium Tower', a contemporary, super-modern residential building in the middle of the sea.   

Teaser poster from the unrealized High Rise 

EV: Do you think this 'up-dated' version of the film would have worked?

JR: No. Stanley and Natali are brilliant film-makers and I'm sure this would have been an extremely interesting dystopian film, but I don't think it would have been a very accurate J.G. Ballard film. Apparently Thomas pushed a futurological take on the book and there is something prophetic about Ballard's writing. But at the same time he's very much an author of the mid-20th century. High Rise, the novel, is deeply inscribed into its social, economic and material context: Britain in the 1970s. Ballard is, in essence, a science fiction author but he's invariably terrestrial. He's far more interested in inner rather than outer space and his project is to look at the psychopathology of the world, particularly the architecture he sees around him. High Rise is his attack, so to speak, on the material and psychological culture of the 1970s. Its events, scenarios and narrative structure would have to change significantly to set it anywhere (or any-when) else. I just don't think the idea would work in a world of mobile phones, social media, out-sourced private security and total surveillance.

About same time that Stanley was developing High Rise, he was also slated to write and direct another project called Vacation. Vacation featured two American tourists stuck in "a seedy Middle Eastern resort" due to "freak solar storms that eradicate all means of communication". This is purely speculative on my part but I would imagine that to make its scenario half-way feasible this contemporary version of High Rise would have had to involve something similar: somekind of external force or event that causes the building to be cut-off. An interesting idea but not necessarily what Ballard was getting at. This is a long, roundabout way of saying that the main success of Wheatley's version is the fact that it is set specifically in the 1970s. 

EV: In the light of this long gestation then, you're saying that Jeremy Thomas finally found the perfect director in Ben Wheatley? 

JR: I think it certainly makes sense for Wheatley to be making this type of film at this stage in his career. It's the right kind of step-up in terms of budget, cast, exposure etc after films like Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013). On a more symbolic level I guess there's what you might call a 'spiritual' inheritance at play with Wheatley making the film. He's on record talking about the influence of Roeg on his own work. At that level its appropriate that he's now taken on and completed Roeg's previously unrealized project. More specifically High Rise fits in very well with Wheatley's ongoing mining of 1970s British culture and what appears to be a developing pre-occupation for dealing with aspects of the British psyche. With A Field in England he looked at aspects of British folklore and Sightseers (2012) analyzed the not-so implicit violence that underwrites the British attitude to the tourist landscape. High Rise shifts focus to urbanism but not without maintaining an emphasis on classic British obsessions: class, manners, status. For all its violence, there's something strangely passive aggressive about both the book and the film. Its savagery comes from the same psychic battlefield covered in the likes of Abigail's Party (1977).

Purgatory: Abigail's Party (1977)

EV: Would you say that Wheatley has come up with a film that's particularly Ballardian?

JR: There are some differences between the novel and Amy Jump's script so, as with any other adaptation, its not totally faithful to the text. That said, I think the film does get the Ballardian sensibility pretty much bang-on. By that I mean Ballard works through a very particular paradigm within his fiction. His concept of inner space is based upon an awareness of a feedback loop between an individual and their built environment. This is one of the primary preoccupations of Ballard's so-called 'Concrete and Steel' trilogy: Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise. To put it bluntly, in High Rise, Ballard attributes a ambiguous level of agency to the building itself. The events of the novel are not neo-Luddite acts of agitation against architecture but are the results of the building realizing its design. The challenge and difficulty of Ballard's writing lies in accepting these events as things to be welcomed if not actively sought out. When seen in the context of Ballard's wider work it is not intended as 'dystopian'.

This is what separates Ballard from a number of comparable texts. There's Cronenberg's first main feature, Shivers (1975) and John Wagner's Judge Dredd story for 2000AD, 'Block Mania' (1981). In Shivers, a strange parasite infects a luxury apartment block leading to all kinds of psycho-sexual chaos. In 'Block Mania' a two gigantic residential towers go to war. Whilst ostensibly similar to High Rise, both of these scenarios are based on the introduction of something 'other' to an otherwise stable community: a hitherto unknown parasite and water-borne poison. This type of 'alien' entity simply does not exist in High Rise. What Ballard describes can be taken as either an amplification of what's already there in the residents or some other form of response to the corporate stricture. Either way there's something about the building that fascinates Ballard. Wheatley and Jump, I think, make this very clear. It would have been really easy to do a kind of 28 Days Later in a tower block but they wisely focus on the strange attraction and resonances of the building's structure to the extent that it becomes a character. The glimpse we get of Royal's synaptic schematics puts this psychogeographical aspect firmly in the frame. It's very much, as Ballard says in the novel, a case of Laing being "exhilarated by the high rise".

Starliner Towers in Cronenberg's Shivers

EV: We've spoken a lot about Ben Wheatley. I think we need to talk about the other side of this creative process, Amy Jump's excellent screenplay. Clearly, she's absorbed much of the ambience of the novel but as you say, there are some changes. Changes for the better?

JR: The changes make for a better film in these sense that the characters are a little more fleshed out. Ballard basically brings together a series of ciphers and sets them to work in the scenario he builds for the text. They are as hermetic as the building because there's very little in the way of any backstory. In addition to developing characters like the boy Toby, Jump does a good job of giving Laing not so much a pre-history as a little more depth. The scenes of him in the teaching hospital and the way that they feed into an integral subplot add a veneer of complexity to the psychological interactions of the film. There's a sense that Laing has something fermenting before he starts getting involved in the psychotic cocktail parties.

Aside from matters of plot one thing that does change is some aspects of the technological specificity that Ballard makes use of. When Wilder begins to climb the high rise under the auspices of making his documentary he is described as carrying a cine-camera. In the film this becomes an early video camera linked to a portable VCR. Although its far from the most implausible aspect of the film in one sense this is an effective change. Technically a cine-camera would give Wilder only a few minutes of filming time per reel: good for the sleazy bathroom porn that's made in the film but not good for a documentary. But that said, Ballard didn't drop the ball here, he just used references to technology in a different way. Wheatley and Jump use the video camera almost as a non-anachronistic means of Wilder taking a selfie. For Ballard, the whole point was that Wilder would run out of film quickly. This allows Ballard to then describe Wilder brandishing an empty camera as he climbs further up, as if it is a totemic residue of his 'past' life, a bit like the wicker camera in Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie (1971).

Hopper: The Last Movie (1971) 

EV: I thought the aesthetics of the film were rendered beautifully. It looked great but at the same time was somewhat lo-fi. This seemed to come out not only in the way that the film looked but also how it sounded. I'm thinking in particular of Portishead's version of ABBA's 'SOS' (1975). The song came out in the same year as the novel. Using the contemporary cover allows it to work as a kind of dissonant parallel: historically accurate but at the same time uncanny.

JR: Yes, that's a real high point in the film. It goes hand in hand with the very accurate rendition of the film's entire, enclosed world. Sonically and visually the whole thing feels extremely real: solid. But as you say it's twisted in the direction of an alternative, altered image. For me the dissonance you describe comes out mostly strongly in some of the set design. The interiors of the high rise itself, particularly the corridors, the lobbies and aspects of the tower garden really remind me of a set of buildings in Marseilles designed by Le Corbusier. Known collectively as the Radiant City (1947-1952), they were built according the architectural principles of the unite d'habitation. Essentially this is a philosophy of modernist design that works to establish an invigorating and improving relationship between the inhabitant and their environment. The main block in Marseilles is a fascinating building that works as a type of modernist sun temple. It has long,dark corridors that open out into blazing sun traps. The roof has a wonderful, almost surreal concrete garden. Royal would feel very at home there. The look of the high rise in the film really calls this to mind.

EV: Marseilles is linked to a project of yours I believe?

JR: Yes very much so, thanks for the plug! Along with the writer and poet David Ashford, I'm making a film about the Radiant City and Unite d'habitation. Not a documentary exactly but rather a speculative piece that connects Marseilles to High Rise. Its based around the (fictional) conceit that not only did Ballard take the building as the inspiration for High Rise but that he based the novel as a whole upon a series of events that took place there. One of Ballard's earlier short stories, 'The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista' (1962) uses the device of a 'psychotronic house': a building that responds to the mood of the occupant, records those moods and 'replays' them back in an odd, affective feedback loop. Of course, the interest for Ballard lies in the potential of this structure to record and replay the affective results of a traumatic event to another inhabitant. Our film takes this idea as its central theme and hypothesizes that Le Corbusier's building has somehow absorbed the events of its fictional double, and this information can be accessed by performing of a series of psychogeographic practices in situ. David and I spent a few days there, getting a sense of the atmosphere in the concrete garden, shooting loads of video and generally running up and down the corridors yelling at each other. As ever, its a work in progress but its coming together well. The finished film will use different kinds of video and cine footage to do a kind of High Rise remix: Ballard re-situated in Marseilles and mixed with Le Corbusier's brutalist utopianism.

Still from a work in progress: Unite d'habitation, Marseilles

EV: Towards the end of the film, we see a young boy looking to the air with a home-made radio. We hear Margaret Thatcher's speech to the House of Commons on 24 November 1976 when she was leader of the opposition. Then we hear The Fall's 'Industrial Estate', released in 1979, the year Thatcher comes to power as Prime Minister. So what's this, High Rise as a test bed for Thatcherism? A radio broadcast from the future that breaks into this documentary on urban planning and the problems arising from shared freehold? 

JR: You're absolutely right. I think its precisely those carefully chosen details that prevent the film from being 'just' a 1970s pastiche. It makes the film somewhat hauntological in its politics. The boy tunes into the near future but seen in 2016 it's a mournful futurology: we're invited to lament what this 'future' became.

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The 1960s at Brunel

Many thanks to Philip Tew and Nick Hubble at the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing for setting up the symposium The 1960s: A Decade of Post War Writing. It was good to be involved and to be speaking at the Artaud building. Amongst great papers on New Worlds, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin and Margaret Drabble by Christopher Daley, Philip Tew, Melanie Seddon and Joseph Darlington, I presented a talk as part of the ongoing Bad Trip series called 'Terminal Data: Moorcock, Ballard and the Fiction of the Decade's End'. The idea was to look at The Final Programme (1968), Crash (1973) and The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) as texts that have been appropriated as catastrophic icons. My starting point was Iain Sinclair's opening statement from his 1999 BFI book on Cronenberg's Crash (1996):

Crash, the novel by J.G. Ballard, appeared in 1973, one of the cultural markers that signalled the end of the 60s. All the elements in the book – characters, landscape and psychopathology – had been drilled and rehearsed through a series of earlier texts, notably The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), where the feral Vaughan first appears.

The argument discussed the signification of "the end of the 60s" and suggested how Moorcock and Ballard's fictions, both essentially mid-decade texts (The Final Programme being written largely in January 1965), deviate from the basic narrative suggested by this trope. This, despite their obvious suggestiveness and symbolic synchronicity with the likes of Altamont and Manson. Some reference was made to Jodorowsky in order to posit the type of metaphorical economy one might wish to apply to Ballard's focus on "hidden logic". 

The Underworld Service

The Underworld Service (2014) is the latest album from English Heretic. Released last year ahead of some welcome re-issues from the project and the upcoming imprint Eighth Climate, Underworld rightly received some great reviews from the likes of Freq and The Quietus. It’s probably the highest profile English Heretic release thus far and works in essence as a summation of the project’s decade-long ‘voyage’. All of the key themes are here: landscape, the occult, the theme of visitation, horror cinema and unconscious geographies. When taken as the follow-up to Anti-Heroes (2013) or seen in the light of Temple of Remembrance (2005) though, The Underworld Service follows a very different tonal path. The package is marked with the same care and sense of immersion that has characterized other English Heretic releases. However, the overall theme of katabasis, (descent, a going down) forms a darker counterpoint to the exploratory trajectories of Anti-Heroes.

Here’s how English Heretic present the album:

"After a decade of toil in the blood drenched, worm eaten, occult battlefields of  Albion, English Heretic takes a well earned holiday... in Hades.  The Underworld Service is a 70 minute radio broadcast from Tartarus, where every song and news report is an intimation of our mortality. The Underworld Service subverts the   culture show format and celebrates the hard hitting documentary format. Scanning a waveband of Corpse Oriented Rock,  Philosophical Stoner, Field Trip Hop, Horror Folk, and Funereal Disco, The Underworld Service is English Heretic’s most death enhancing release to date."

On Anti-Heroes English Heretic channeled the psychopathologies and psycheogeographies of Psychomania (1973), Robert Cochrane and Robert Vaughan. These misanthropes and renegade scientists were narrated as patron saints of the death drive, launching into oblivion with ecstasy and relief. The various synchronicities plotted also outlined a powerful associative zone across the space surveyed by the project. This “lunatic corridor” that is said to move through slough and its environs works appears as a combination of Ballard’s “geography of sensory deprivation” described in Kingdom Come (2006) and the neurological after-effects of the visitations in The Mothman Prophecies (2002).  Despite the negative trajectories plotted, it seemed that Anti-Heroes still positioned itself as part of a visionary tradition. A comparison could be made with the Iain Sinclair / Alan Moore matrix of White Chappell Scarlett Tracings (1987) and From Hell (1999). Each work comprehensively dissects an area to reveal a series of hidden patterns. Whilst the narratives are aggressive in their depicted violence, the conceptual impetus is apocalyptic in the most literal sense: the movement towards an act of revealing.

By focusing less on thanatosis and more on katabasis, (or more specifically ‘sepulculture’), The Underworld Service positions itself very much on the other side of the mirror. Here, death is not (anti) heroic but a phenomenon associated with a set of ritual practices, all of which are seen to have lost their instrumental potency in the mid to late 20^th century. The culture of the late-1960s is a familiar territory for English Heretic, but in The Sacred Geography of British Cinema (2005), the location traces of Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968) provided a means of charging or “fecundating” the imagination. With The Underworld Service there is the sense that the land and the national culture is so suffused with death (there is a running concern with World in Action and its broadcast sense of eternal war) that it’s excess has outstripped any imaginative capacity to process it. As such, the key film mediated here is Peter Newbrook’s The Asphyx (1972), the grim story of an (inevitably) doomed attempt to capture the spirit of death.  Another scene that springs to mind is the end of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981). Lost in a seemingly endless underworld, Catriona McColl and David Warbeck “face the sea of darkness” and disappear. Particularly listening to the album’s title track it seems as if The Underworld Service is pitched in a similar terminal zone.  

This is not to say that The Underworld Service falls short of the bar set by other English Heretic releases. On the contrary, I think the focus on katabasis gives the project’s overall emphasis on inner cinema and the validity of individual psychic events something of a critical trajectory. The album is just as hermetic and ‘underground’ (literally and metaphorically) as its predecessors, but it also appears directed towards cultural rather than individual exploration. The England it unfolds is pervaded with death, corporeal and institutional. Horror cinema is presented as an ambivalent axis or crossroads between ‘real world’ atrocities and misdirected moral crusades that aim largely toward the limitation of creative impulses (see: ‘Video Anxieties’). The album works to foreground this, with much of the same attitude and provocation evident in The Plague Yard (1990) Simon Dwyer’s dissection of the culture / counterculture interface in the late 1980s.  What emerges is an encouragement to re-think and re-vivify the mediatory processes linked to death, dying and associated thanoteric forms.  

Dee's dolphin

Today a number of stories appeared about a stranded dolphin in the River Dee, Flintshire. After swimming upstream during a high spring tide the dolphin became stuck on a series of sandbanks and had to be rescued and returned to the sea by the RNLI.  

Its four-day sojourn in Saltney Ferry generated some strange and uncanny photographs, images that seemed to show this suburb of Chester slipping into a cataclysmic state of existence. See the caption below for an inevitable quote from J. G. Ballard. 

"Now they were to abandon yet another city. Despite the massive construction of the main commercial buildings, it consisted of little more than three principal lagoons, surrounded by a nexus of small lakes fifty yards in diameter and a network of narrow creeks and inlets which wound off, roughly following the original street plan of the city, into the outlying jungle"
                        --J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (New York: Berkley Books, 1962), pp.19-20.

Phase IV

The talk on poetry and swarms (see previous post ) concluded with a reference to the film Phase IV (1974) directed by Saul Bass. Bass was best known as a pioneering designer of title sequences (Hitchcock, Preminger) and Phase IV is the only film he directed. It was written by Mayo Simon, who would later go on to pen the screenplay for Richard T. Hafflin’s Futureworld (1976). 

Focusing on a threatening accumulation of ants in the Arizona desert, the film ostensibly works as part of the sub-genre of loosely ‘ecological’ horror films that proliferated in the 1970s. Night of the Lepus (1972), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), Empire of the Ants (1977) and The Swarm (1978) amongst many others, posited a revolt of ‘nature’ against the human world and its attendant forms of ecological exploitation: urban growth, pollution, environmentally damaging experimentation and destructive profiteering. In essence, these films took the imagery of the Cold War radiation fantasy Them! (1954) and combined it with a different criteria of otherness and a less overt (but nonetheless resonant) internal agenda. Paranoia remained in the 1970s as cinema’s primary fear reflex but having adjusted its image of monstrosity from aliens and communists to animals and insects, this fear no longer emanated from the borderlands  Instead it was located in nature itself, that which is immanent, proximate and ambivalent.

The production of Phase IV no doubt benefited from this contemporary fixation but ideologically, the film was very different from the work of Irwin Allen and Bert I. Gordon. This difference was a source of its failure at the time of its initial release but has equally has become the source of its current cult appeal. The film’s promotional poster suggests that it works as a fairly conventional insect-related horror movie. All the tropes are there: images of human peril, malevolent ants, and a hyperbolic, funereal tag line, “The day the earth was turned into a cemetery!”[1]

However, this depiction only relates to one scene in the film. It also does nothing to connote its scientific, almost anthropological tone. (One wonders what the image would have been like if Bass, himself a graphic designer, had of been in charge of the publicity campaign.) In contrast to the binary hysterics of Empire of the Ants, Phase IV owes much more to the clinical, institutional detachment of early Cronenberg, particularly Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970). As with the extensive body horror Cronenberg would go onto perpetuate, these works propose something of a posthuman agenda whereby the human body is rendered obsolete in the face of a research trajectory that attempts to articulate and manifest new forms of consciousness: telepathic, physical and sexual. Similarly, Phase IV uses the idea of the ants as a ‘hive-mind’ to depict a collective, constellate intelligence. This entity is not without offensive potential that offers a violent threat to the human form, but as the film concludes, the title implication becomes clear. Bass and Simon do not end with flame-throwers and a renewed attempt to prevent further invasion, as in both Them! and The Swarm but hint that the swarm structure of the ants represents a further ‘phase’ of organic life in which homo sapiens can participate.

At least, this was Bass and Simon’s initial intention. When Phase IV was first released, its preview length of 93 minutes was cut down to 84. Amongst the material excised by the distributor was a 4 minute montage sequence that closed the film. 

Coming after the line, “they wanted us” this conclusion suggests that the emergence of the ant swarm signals the start of an evolutionary tribulation for the 2 surviving characters. Bass’s imagery combines the dystopian with the tyrannical as well as symbols of transformation, transcendence and psychedelic expansion. In the cut version, this conclusion is significantly more explicatory. “They wanted us”, we are told, to become part of “their world”. Here, the visionary range of the original ending is lost in favour of a conclusion that veers more towards a negative re-telling of the 1950s monster scenario. 

It appears as if the “transformation” hinted at is a surrender of the human form to the monstrosity of the ants. By contrast, in the original version, whilst the transformation depicted is not without trauma, that which is projected is far from a terminal phase.  Bass and Simon seem to point towards a state of posthuman hybridity, more redolent of the transitions seen in J.G. Ballard than a capitulation to the eco-apocalypse scenarios posited in the likes of George McCowans’s Frogs (1972):

I know now that I shall return to the Everglades. As the example of that brave apostate priest who gave the cross to me illustrates, there is an immense reward to be   found in that frozen forest. There in the everglades, the transfiguration of all living and inanimate forms occurs before our eyes, the gift of immortality a direct consequence of the surrender by each of us of our own physical and temporal identity. However apostate we may be in this world, there perforce we become apostles of the prismatic sun.[2]

The lost ending of Phase IV was recently restored for a special screening at the Alamo Drafthouse on December 1, 2012. This was a mere 20 days before the projected end of the world. That this ending should emerge at this time speaks volumes about its original intention. If Phase IV carries an apocalyptic sensibility, it is an apocalypse in the sense of a process of ‘revealing’; something to be sought out rather than defended against.

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[1] Compare this with the tagline of Kingdom of Spiders, “A living, crawling, Hell on earth!”

[2] J.G. Ballard, ‘The Illuminated Man’ in The Terminal Beach (London: Gollancz, 1964), pp. 74-104 (p.104). 

Black Box

I've written a piece on the imaginative life of the Black Box / Flight Data Recorder. 

                    Read it here: http://literature-technology-media.co.uk/?p=280

Introduction: the multi-storey car park

In Crash! (1971) a short film by Harley Cokliss, J.G. Ballard drives around London's motorway hinterlands outlining his psychogeographical take on contemporary architecture. He had recently completed The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and was about to embark on his classic 'concrete and steel' trilogy, Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975). Ballard's basic idea is that the development of the 20th century has precipitated a reversal in the categories of fiction and reality, a movement that is manifested in the reflection of the psyche in the architecture of the urban landscape.

In the film Ballard discusses these ideas as he spirals up the multiple levels of a blank, evacuated car park, calling it 'one of the most mysterious buildings ever built'. The voice over continues:

'is it a model for some strange psychological state: somekind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us?

...

More exactly, I think that new emotions and new feelings are being created, that modern technology is beginning to reach into our dreams and change our whole way of looking at things and perceiving reality, that more and more it is drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world'.

Residual noise is not a blog about architecture, but about the process of recording. Although the two spheres may not appear to synchronize (proponents of the Stone Tape thesis may disagree; see future post), where I to choose a manifesto to cover these posts, it would be Ballard's statement. I'm interested in the desire, the propulsion to record: to externalize, to materialize and to duplicate. I'm interested in the range of tools that have been developed to facilitate this and their various applications: actual, potential and speculative. I don't accept the notion that recording is somehow tied to objectivity. If a tape recorder was placed in the centre of a room and operated without interference, I wouldn't regard the result as a 'mere' record of ambient noise.

Recording is always a process of recoding in which information moves from one sign system to another. This transition has an effect upon the information conveyed as well as upon the individual user. We may reach for a recording device to capture an element of 'reality' but this perception of reality is actively shaped by recording technology.

To take another Ballardian example, in High Rise its easy to see the outbreak of violence and disorder in the building as acts of aggression towards the structure and by extension, the urban world. However, from the outset, of the novel this trajectory is essentially reversed. Laing is 'exhilarated' by the high rise. The structure has a palpable, psychological and physical effect upon him and the chaos that subsequently unfolds can be seen as a significantly more complex form of this influence. Ballard suggests that the events are indicative of the building's correct operational procedure. The violence is not a reaction to the design structure but constitutes a range of behavior that the building has been designed to promote.

On a less cataclysmic scale, this is the perspective I'd like this blog to explore. Beyond issues of fidelity, storage capacity and tape speed, I'm interested in getting some sense of the hidden function linked to recording and recording technology. Its utility as regards audio-visual information is obvious. We can make copies, archive images and music, preserve voices. We can playback, erase and search but looking further than these practical implications, technical innovations and commercial adaptability, the questions can still be asked: what does recording technology do and what is it for?

The answers have less to do with the contents of instruction books than with ideas of prostheses, format specificity, noise, mediation and street level applications. When a given platform is used, a particular interface is established.

This blog is trying to investigate some of the territories that emerge at such a point.