There’s not much I can say about Ballard that hasn’t already been said. He was definitely a Coilhouse patron saint. Because so much has been written about Ballard’s influence on everything from cyberpunk (check out this rich article, which buzzes with the excitement of the genre’s earliest memories of itself) to modern music (as this article asserts, Ballard could be credited for having “inspired the entire genre of industrial music”), I’m going to make this obituary very subjective and leave you with my favorite Ballard memories.
The first one was watching Empire of the Sun with my parents. I didn’t know at the time that this movie, starring a 13-year-old Christian Bale, was actually based on Ballard’s autobiography. But I remember that even then, watching that film, I wondered: how would this kid, with his confused Stockholm Syndrome identification with the Japanese who kept him prisoner, his fetishization of aircraft and explosions, turn out later in life? Later, a friend helped me put 2 & 2 together, and I found out exactly how he turned out. He wrote Crash. And it all made perfect sense. Here’s Young Ballard in Empire of the Sun; haunting to re-watch on this day:
My second favorite Ballard moment is actually a famous quote of his. This was his response to a question in Re/Search 8/9 on October 30, 1982:
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.
Suburb of the soul. It still makes me shudder.
Post your favorite Ballard memories/impressions/quotes in the comments. We honor his influence, and we will miss him.
The Matrix turned 10 last week. It debuted March 31, 1999, though us plebs had to wait til April 2 to see it.
It’s easy to forget, in the wake of two disastrous sequels and equally lackluster (except for the Animatrix) tie-ins, exactly how radical and groundbreaking a pop culture artifact the first movie was.
Try, for a second, to look at the original trailer. Imagine you know absolutely nothing about the movie inside:
Pretty f’in cool, no?
To date myself, I was 16 at the time and came out of the theater utterly energized. I wasn’t the only one. William Gibson dubbed it “an innocent delight I hadn’t felt in a long time.” Darren Aronofsky raved that it heralded a new age in sci-fi. Neil Gaiman and Poppy Z. Brite wrote stories to fill out the movie’s universe.
It became a phenomenon, immensely successful and influential beyond anyone’s expectation. Hell, conservative scolds even blamed the movie’s anarchistic heroes for the Columbine massacre.
The Matrix worked because it managed to blend philosophy, allegory, action and fashion into one glorious, fun package.
Go ahead. Read it. Just don’t send me your psychiatric bills.
-from the Analog review of Antibodies
Welcome back, dear Coilhaüsers, to All Tomorrows. This time we’re going a bit outside of our usual Deviant Era range to take a deep, long (yeah, you’ll never forgive me) look at David J. Skal’s 1988 novel Antibodies. A little later than the usual works, yes, but if anything gets captures the guts of Deviant Era’s transgressive glories, it’s this pitch-black wallow on the wrong side of Transhumanism.
Skal, mostly a horror historian, wrote only a handful of science fiction novels, and this was the last. It’s not hard to see why. Antibodies is a horror tale in future clothing: a detailed examination of how nasty it gets when humans try to permanently scrap flesh for metal, and how easily believing plebs are still led to the slaughter by their puppet-masters.
I’ve recommended a lot of disturbing books in this column and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon, but I will warn you right now: Antibodies is not for everyone. It is a deeply disturbing, brutally unsparing book. The anonymous reviewer from Analog wasn’t fucking around. This is a tale with no mercy and no illusions. You’ve been warned.
Dontcha love it when we get it right? I love high-budget, haute-goth fashion editorials and seeing big-name designers go dark on the runway, but there’s something especially satisfying about seeing designers “of the scene” really pull off something spectacular from start to finish, from garment to finished photograph. It’s a pleasure when designers not only produce gorgeous garments, but really get involved in presenting them in a certain way. In this case, Tea Bauer, creator of Slovenian fashion label Degenerotika (previously featured here), borrows a page from Vintage Vogue to give us the wonderfully classic, textured and geometric “when-Leeloo-met-Irving-Penn” fashion image above. I love everything about it! More large-size images from this series, after the jump.
Yellow hair? Yum! Coat’s not too shabby, either. Degenerotika is definitely one to watch.
Things have been a bit slow around here – comrade Nadya is off gallivanting around the Nevada desert and comrade Mer’s traipsing about New York, where I was all weekend. Do pardon our regrouping and accept this small offering of oh my god it’s a wearable motorcycle.
It really is. Jake Loniak, a student at Art Center College of Design, presents this wonderful invention. Basically an electric, lithium battery-run exoskeleton with three wheels, Deus Ex Machina would be run by a computer which would translate and respond to the rider’s body with the motorcycle’s own thirty six pneumatic muscles. This SciFi dream-machine is envisioned by Loniak as a sport bike, and, as fate would have it, doesn’t exist beyond his concept as of yet. He’s confident in real world potential of Deus Ex Machina, anyhow: “I believe a working prototype could be made, but it would take a great deal of time and engineering. This isn’t fantasy – it’s a green vehicle, and all of the numbers are based in the real world”. How sweet it could be, Jake. Come on, technologically-inclined billionaires of the world, make it so!
While waiting for a physical prototype, we can torture ourselves with this realistically rendered video of Deus Ex machine in action. Thanks for the pain, Jerem.
The image above could be the first poster for Joseph Kahn‘s film adaptation of William Gibson’s landmark cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. Word of a Neuromancer movie has been buzzing around for nearly a decade, but seeing a visual representation does make it a all bit more real.
Khan is currently known for his directorial debut, Torque, and a music video for the Britney Spears song “Toxic”. Mildly put, his repertoire doesn’t exactly thrill most Neuromancer fans. This, combined with the general sentiment that Neuromancer simply can not be translated into film, has the director under a lot of pressure. Since so little is known about the film production, rumor mills have been churning out all sorts of gems. There is the prospect of Hayden Christensen playing anti-hero hacker Case, a post claims this protagonist’s name would be changed to “Cage”, there’s the fact that Gibson himself is saying close to nothing about the film. There is even concept art out there!
What we’re not seeing, however, is a full cast list, nor any real confirmation that the film is actually happening [official website? IMDB page updates?]. Regardless, I hope that Kahn will stick to his guns and make a great movie, some necessary departure from the original withstanding. I’ll suppress my instinctual cynicism until there’s any real information to be had. While we wait, I’m desperately curious to hear yourideal Neuromancer cast nominations! The IMDB forums offer some interesting choices, here.
Model wearing one of René Cigler’s apocalyptic adornments.
Sad news from BoingBoing: artist René Cigler has passed away. Cigler’s many talents included illustration, sculpture, costuming, toy design and running her own shop, Strange Monster, with partner Cameron Smith in Portland. My favorite works by Rene were always her apocalyptic costume designs, many of which were worn by dancers in Ministry’s stage performances, as well as in the film version of Tank Girl.
Cigler does a great job of creating a strong field, a believable fiction, around her work. Even though this type of industrial/post-apocalyptic/Road Warrior art has been done to death, René’s work still seems fresh and interesting. One saving grace is that her sculptures have a sense of humor – they don’t seem to take themselves too seriously … hub cap necklaces, hats made out of barbecue grills, purses made out of cereal boxes and rubber car mats. This is the kind of high fashion one might imagine wearing after the world has run out of oil, the rainforests are gone, and the local supermall offers nothing but mountains of rubble (fashion accessories?) and lurking blood-thirsty mutants.
Among her many publications (which ranged from Penthouse to People to Heavy Metal), there is one very striking cover:
Zoetica’s solo art show (and birthday! woo!) takes place in Toronto this Thursday. The event unveils a new series of gorgeous monochrome ink and digital drawings, which began with our jetpacked Coilhouse poster girl and spiraled off into a new mythology. The subjects of the series – a team of “off-world cloud hunters” – posses high-altitude breathing devices, candy-shaped gravity-defying hairstyles and futuristic clothing that’s remeniscent of Plastik Wrap, the host of the gallery event. Adriana from Plastik Wrap and Zoetica previously collaborated on several fashionshoots, my favorite one taking place at the Bradbury Building in Downtown LA (most famously captured as J.F. Sebastian’s apartment building in Blade Runner). More information about this event can be found on Zo’s personal blog.
Just in case you can’t make it, here’s a cloud hunter – and three more after the jump.
How hot is this? Needs to be worn with a space helmet, though. Another lavish image after the cut, and more from this collection at Scherer Gonzalez’s site.
..is what I would say if this concept design for a fingernail timepiece were to actually make it into our daily lives. From the 2154: The Future of Time Design website:
TX54 is a disposable timepiece that is worn on the user’s thumbnail. While its translucency makes it blend seamlessly with the hand, a selection of text color options and a glow feature that activates on command make it easy to read.
Now, forget the finger. Wouldn’t you prefer to simply know the time, without having to think about it? On second thought, that might be a little maddening, especially for those as obsessed with the passage of time as your truly. In any case, here it is:
Sublimex is worn on the eye like a contact lens where it periodically flashes the time so quickly that the brain isn’t conscious of how it got the information. The user seems to simply know the time, raising a host of possibilities about how the nature of clockwatching would change.
But you see, we live in a time where designers make drooling lechers of us all. They flaunt their charts, mock-ups, concept art and shiny 3-D models without concrete promise of these ideas ever making it into our homes, laps, nails, etc. But I always come back for more, grateful to them for bringing this Future For The Home we dream of just a little closer.
