| david turgeon on Sat, 9 Feb 2002 10:31:02 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> vagueness, low science |
>i dont know the english title of his 'sky scrapper' >(i.g.h. in french) _high rise_. when i read that book, i loved it (it's my favourite JG ballard book) but i remained incredulous, & then one night i stumbled into an apartment building in state college, PA that had wet toilet paper & trash all over the corridors, just like what happens in the building halfway through the book. likewise, i thought _twin peaks_ was a fantasy up until i spent a few days in bloomington-normal, IL. it's a matter of fact that ballard was always fascinated with america. but ballard is also all about simulation; his classic framework is to start with an incredible situation, & from there onwards make everything logical & realistic. (this contrasts with kafka where the initial, incredible situation is more litterally forced onto the character which it gradually destroys up until the end of the story.) one could read his novel _hello america_ just as such, a simulation with the american continent, here turned into an abstract hostile environment. this way of writing is interesting not because the initial conditions are anything we know, but because everything that follows the first few pages is strictly plausible & justified, & we eventually recognize patterns from our own very real experience, here found again, perhaps in a different magnitude, still being "realistic" in a more global situation which we think unrealistic. it's all in the difference of roles between the peg & the board game (which brings us to mandelbrot.) the wet toilet paper & trash come to be seen as a vague pattern indicative of other patterns taking place elsewhere at equivalent magnitudes. being an illustration, it does not tell, it only shows. it's dangerous to draw strict conclusions on these observations, but one cannot help but learning from them. but to end more like a movie review (as this is america we're talking about), a most interesting companion to _high rise_ is the david cronenberg film _shivers_ (1975) <http://us.imdb.com/Title?0073705> which also takes place in an isolated apartment building. here, the inhabitants are contaminated not by their own abstract isolation, but by a more down-to-earth worm-kind-of-thing which renders everyone into a sex maniac. not to be missed. have a nice day ~ david # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]