Category: {science fiction}

Science fiction

1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies

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Via Ballardian:

In 1984 J.G. Ballard called for a ‘Festival of Home Movies’ and 24 years on we’re happy to oblige: announcing our latest competition, to promote JGB’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life. Presented by ballardian.com and HarperCollins UK, the competition will utilise ‘modern electronics’ as specified above, of an especial type that Ballard with his prodigious clairvoyant powers came close to envisaging: the mobile phone (or cell phone, for our North American cousins).

The requirement is that you shoot a one-minute film on a Ballardian theme using your mobile phone’s video camera only, no post-production allowed. That’s too much for my Motorola (above) which has never proved itself able to record more than a few seconds of continuous video for reasons unknown. The competition prize is a copy of Miracles of Life along with the forthcoming HarperCollins reissues of Ballard’s Millennium People, The Drought, The Crystal World, The Drowned World and The Unlimited Dream Company.

The constraints for this are pretty tough if all the editing has to be done in camera. I anticipate a lot of entries showing static shots of motorway traffic, windswept concrete vistas or imitations of CCTV. Anyone wishing for some offbeat inspiration can go and watch the One Minute Movies made by The Residents to accompany their Commercial Album in 1980.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• JG Ballard book covers

Blog this: tits out for the future

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left: tits t-shirt by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren.
right: the Hipp Chronoscope via io9.

A new year brings new blogs which is perhaps just as well seeing as the old year drew a line under some regular reads.

The Look, “Adventures in pop and rock fashion”, began posting a couple of weeks ago, spinning off from Paul Gorman’s book of the same name. Pieces there which immediately catch my eye are a skate through Billy Bowers’ outrageous clothing designs and a nice potted-history of the “tits tee”. I’d not realised before that the history of this latter creation goes back beyond punk to the early Seventies, another example of the evolution from post-psychedelic freakery to punk being a process of gradual elision, not the clean break that lazy commentary often suggests.

Also arriving (and noted everywhere by now) is io9, a new addition to the Gawker network, which looks at sf-related culture. I’ve already had a traffic spike from there after they linked to my Hugh Ferriss post and it’s good to see that Bldg Blog‘s Geoff Manaugh is among their contributors.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ave Atque Vale!

Gold robots

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Even cigarette lighters aren’t immune from the Japanese desire to robotise the world, one object at a time. These are real gold versions of the Lightan, robot characters from an Eighties anime series, Golden Warrior Gold Lightan, and are currently on display at The Great Robot Exhibition in the National Museum of Nature and Science, Ueno, Tokyo until January 27th, 2008. The always reliable PingMag has a good exhibition report which is fortunate since the official site is Japanese-only.

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Among the antique automata in the exhibition there’s this rather splendid clockwork crab. It would have been nice to know something about this but the only information is a Japanese caption. What was it for? Were many of these made or was it unique, like the Bowes Swan?

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Almacan
• The sculpture of Christopher Conte
• The Bowes Swan