Contemporary Letterpress: J.G. Ballard Novels 1970–75

The landscape of the 1970s was a marriage of the physical aspects of humanity with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. J.G Ballard explores the exact way that he can bring together visual codes expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality. The complex relationship between ourselves and the world around us.

Highly potent visual codes can be seen repeated throughout every aspect of the modern landscape. What do they mean? J.G Ballard makes sense of these huge technological systems and thinks that it is the vital job of the writer to try to analyse and understand the true significance of this metalized dream.

Crash is peculiar and anatomical fiction of humans fetishizing car crash scenarios, Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.

Concrete Island begins as an almost ludicrous predicament in Concrete Island soon turns into horror as the protagonist realises that, despite evidence of other inhabitants in the liminal spaces below the motorway where he has crashed, this doomed terrain has become a mirror of his own mind. Seeking the dark outer rim of the everyday, Ballard weaves private catastrophe into an intensely specular allegory.

High rise is the story describes the disintegration of a luxury high-rise building as its affluent residents gradually descend into violent chaos. High-Rise inquires into the ways in which modern social and technological landscapes could alter the human psyche in provocative and hitherto unexplored ways.