Science Fictional the Aesthetics of Science Fiction Beyond the Limits of Genre

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Science Fictional The Aesthetics of Science Fiction Beyond the Limits of Genre

Andrew Frost University of NSW | College of Fine Arts PhD Media Arts 2013

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ScMtnce Flcdonal: The Anthetics of SF Beyond the Umlts of Genre proposes that oonte~my eufture 1$ * $pallal e)Cl>ertence dom1nS'ed by an aesane(IC or science liction and its qua,;.genefic form, the ·$dence ficdonal', The study explores the connective lines between cultural objects suet! as film, video art. painting, illustration, advertising, music, and children's television in a variety ofmediums and media coupled with research that conflates aspects of ctitical theory, art history a nd cuttural studies into a unique d iscourse. The study argues thai three types of C\lltural e ffeets reverberation. densi'ly and resonanoe- affect cultural space altering ood changing the 1ntel'l)totation and influeooe of a cuUural object Through an account of the nature of the science fictional, this thesis argues that science fiction as wo uncJersland It, a.nd how 11 has beon oooventionally concefved, is in fact the counter of its apparent function within wider culture. While terms such as ·genre~ and ·maln-stream• suggest a binary of oentre and periphery, this lh-&&is demonstrates that the quasi-generic is in fact the dominant partner in the process of cultural production,

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For Lily Frost.

“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.”

- Criswell, Plan 9 From Outer Space [1959].

Contents

Note on Usage & Images 7

List of Illustrations 8

Introduction 14

Defining Science Fiction 22

Reverberation 49

Density 68

Resonance 95

Studio Project 209

Conclusion 229

Works Cited 233

Bibliography 258

Notes on Usage & Image Details

The term “science fiction” is used to denote a wide field of cultural production that includes literature and film. It is commonly contracted to “SF”. This study alternates between both usages for the sake of readability, particularly when used in the same paragraph or sentence. Much debate surrounds science fiction as a genre fiction, and its often-troubled relationship to “mainstream” literature. As a means to denote a difference between science fiction literature and science fiction film the term “literary SF” is used when discussing published print works. Many paintings produced by science fiction illustrators, particularly those painted before 1960, have been lost and survive only in reproduction. Where details such as medium, dimension and collection are known, these are cited in image captions; where they are not, known details are included. Images taken from advertising, film, TV programs or online sources are cited using standard MLA conventions where details are known.

With Thanks

Many thanks to my generous PhD supervisor Dr. Ross Harley, post graduate coordinator Dr. Petra Gemeinboeck, co-supervisor John Gilles, the ever helpful Karen Ryan and Kathy Yeh, the technical know-how of Dr. Alex Davies, and two sensible ladies, Kate Shea & Rachel Shea.

7 List of Illustrations

Introduction & Defining Science Fiction

Fig 1.1 Ward Shelley, The History of Science Fiction V.1, 2009. Oil colour and toner on Mylar, 137x76cm. Detail. Collection: The Artist.

Fig 1.2 Superflex. Flooded McDonalds, 2008. RED video installation. 20 mins, looped. Collection: Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Fig 1.3 Aernout Mik, Pulverous, 2003. Three-channel video installation, 23:27, looped. Collection: Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland.

Fig 1.4 Mitra Tabrizian, City, London, 2008. Type C photograph, 122x250 cm. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

Fig 1.5 Otolith Group, Anathema, 2011. Digital video.

Fig 1.6 Anne Lislegaard, Crystal World (after J.G.Ballard), 2006. 2-channel 3D animation, 2 leaning screens, no sound.

Density

Fig 3.1 Ed Ruscha, Fountain of Crystal, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 76x91cm. Collection: Gagosian Gallery, London.

Fig 3.2 Adam McEwan, Honda Teen Facial, 2010. Boeing 747 undercarriage, approximately 350x300x182cm. Private Collection.

Fig 3.3 J. G. Ballard, Project for A New Novel [detail], 1958.

Fig 3.4 J.G Ballard. Venus Smiles, Advertisers Announcement #5, 1970. Magazine advertisement, various sizes.

Fig 3.5 Florian Maier-Aichen, One Day at Spiral Jetty, 2009. Gelatin silver print, 24x30cm. Private collection.

8 Fig 3.6 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water, 457.2x4.57m. Dia Foundation.

Fig 3.7 Tacita Dean. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1997, 1999. 35mm slide projector 35mm slide, variable dimensions. . Collection: British Council.

Fig 3.8 Powers of Ten. Dir. Charles & Ray Eames. IBM/Office of Charles & Ray Eames, 1977. Film.

Resonance

Fig. 4.1 2012. Dir. Roland Emmerich. Columbia Pictures/Centropolis Entertainment, 2009. Film.

Fig. 4.2 THX 1138. Dir. George Lucas. American Zoetrope/Warner Bros. 1971. Film.

Fig 4.3 Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1836. Oil on canvas, 130x193cm. Collection: New York Historical Society.

Fig 4.4 John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851. Oil on canvas, 196x303cm. Collection: Tate Britain.

Fig 4.5 Barnett Newman, Third Station, 1960. Oil on canvas, 198x153cm. Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

Fig 4.6 Barnett Newman, Fifth Station, 1962. Oil on canvas, 198x153cm. Collection: Robert & Jane Meyerhoff.

Fig 4.7 Barnett Newman, The Ninth Station, 1964. Acrylic on canvas, 198x152cm. Collection: Robert & Jane Meyerhoff.

Figs 4.8, 4.9. THX 1138. Dir. George Lucas. American Zoetrope/Warner Bros. 1971. Film.

Figs 4.10, 4.11 The Matrix. Dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski. Village Roadshow Pictures/Warner Bros. 1999. Film.

Fig 4.12 Hayden Fowler, Second Nature, 2008. Single channel, high definition digital video, 36:20, looped.

9 Fig 4.13 Sam Smith, Permutation Set, 2010. Four channel HD video, four stereo channels, 00:20 x 16,777,216 permutations.

Fig 4.14 Ms&Mr, Study for Retrograde Motion, 1988-2008. 2-channel video archived VHS rotoscoped with HDV and animation, 0:47 looped.

Figs 4.15, 4.16 Soda_Jerk, After the Rainbow, 2009. 2-channel digital video, 5:30, looped. Fig 4.17 Astounding Science Fiction, Jan. 1958.

Fig 4.18 Fantastic Story, ND.

Fig 4.19 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct.1958

Fig 4.20 Astounding SF. Oct. 1953.

Fig 4.21 Astounding SF, June 1951.

Fig 4.22 SF Quarterly May, 1954.

Fig 4.23 Hieronymus Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights [detail]. Oil on panel triptych, 220x389 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Fig 4.24 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe. Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor) painted as Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons, c.1590-1. Oil on wood, 68x56 cm. Skoklosters Slott, Bålsta, Sweden.

Fig 4.25 Chesley Bonestell, Saturn As Seen From The Surface of Titan, 1944. Oil on board, 41x51cm. Collection: Adler Planetarium, Chicago.

Fig 4.26 Chesley Bonestell, Assembling the Mars Expedition, 1950. Oil on board, 53x94cm. Private Collection.

Fig 4.27 Chesley Bonestell, Baby Satellite, 1956. Oil on board, 51x63cm. Private Collection.

Fig 4.28 Chesley Bonestell, Exploring The Moon By Earthlight, 1961. Oil on board, 36x36cm. Private Collection.

10 Fig 4.29 Chesley Bonestell, The Surface of Venus, 1949. Oil on board, dimensions unknown. Private Collection.

Fig 4.30 Chesley Bonestell, The End of The World As The Sun Becomes Nova [detail], 1955. Oil on board, 58x86cm. Private Collection.

Fig 4.31 Chesley Bonestell, A Nova Is Beginning To Melt The Mountains of a Hypothetical Planet, 1964. Oil on board, 41x51cm. Private Collection.

Fig 4.32 Albert Bierstadt, Sunset in The Yosemite, 1868. Oil on board, 91x132cm. Collection: Haggin Museum, Stockton, California.

Fig 4.33 Thomas Cole, The Architect’s Dream, 1840. Oil on canvas, 134x213cm. Collection: Toledo Museum of Art.

Fig 4.34 Frederic Church, Cotopaxi, 1862. Oil on canvas, 307x546cm. Collection: Detroit Institute of Arts, Chicago.

Fig 4.35 Chesley Bonestell, Jupiter’s Surface, 1949. Oil on board, 41x51cm. Private Collection.

Fig 4.36 Chesley Bonestell, Hiroshima, USA. Colliers Magazine, August 5th, 1950.

Fig 4.37 Fitz Hugh Lane, Gloucester Harbor at Sunrise, c. 1850. Oil on canvas, 60x91cm. Collection: Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Fig 4.38 Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1958.

Fig 4.39 Michael R. Whelan, Foundation, 1985. Acrylic on canvas, 81x50cms.

Fig 4.40 Don Maitz, Catchworld, 1978. Oil on Masonite, 76x50cm. Collection: the artist.

Fig 4.41 Boris Vallejo, Gateways in The Sand, 1976. Oil on canvas, 65x100cm.

Fig 4.42 Chris Foss, The Norman Conquest 2066, 1976.

Fig 4.43 Chris Foss, The Bloodstar Conspiracy, 1978.

Fig 4.44 Chris Foss, The Drought, 1977.

11 Fig 4.45 Chris Foss, Turner Spaceship, 1991.

Fig 4.46 JMW Turner, The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her last Berth To Be Broken Up, 1839. Oil on canvas, 91x122cm. Collection: National Gallery, London.

Fig 4.47 JMW Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844. Oil on canvas, 91x121cm. Collection: National Gallery, London.

Fig 4.48 Chris Foss, Stars Like Dust [aka Asteroid Hunters], 1976.

Fig 4.49 Glenn Brown, Ornamental Despair (Painting for Ian Curtis), 1994. Oil on canvas, 200x300 cm. Private Collection.

Fig 4.50 Glenn Brown, Exercise One (For Ian Curtis) 1995. Oil on canvas, 50x70cm. Private Collection.

Fig 4.51 Chris Foss, Red Tanker, 1970.

Fig 4.52 Glenn Brown, Böcklin’s Tomb, 1998. Oil on canvas, 221x330cm. Sander Collection.

Fig 4.53 Chris Foss, Floating Cities, 1981.

Fig 4.54 Subaru, Photographer: Mark Llewellynn, 2004.

Fig 4.55 Lexus, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2009.

Fig 4.56 Audi, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2010.

Fig 4.57 Mitsubishi, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2010.

Fig 4.58 Porsche, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2006.

Fig 4.59 Land Rover, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2006.

Fig 4.60 Land Rover, Photographer: Kerry Wilson, 2011

Figs. 4.61, 4.62, 4.63. Teletubbies [BBC Television/Ragdoll Productions, 1997-2001] TV series.

12 Fig 4.64 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Solar Equation, 2010. Spherical captive balloon, helium, tethers and winches, 5 HD projectors, 7 computers with custom-made software, wifi network, iOS app, 14 meters diameter.

Fig 4.65 Semiconductor, Black Rain, 2009. 03:00 mins SD + HD/ 16:9. Installation version: single screen portrait HD / 17 minute loop.

Fig 4.66 Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Turbine Hall, Tate Modern. Humidifiers, semi-circular disc, mono-frequency lamps, and mirror, various dimensions.

Fig 4.67 Lazy Town. Dir. Magnús Scheving, Jonathan Judge and Steve Feldman et al. Lazy Town Productions 2005-2008. TV Series.

Fig 4.68 Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom. Dir. Neville Astley. Astley Baker Davies Ltd, 2009. TV series.

Fig 4.69 Hqmarcos, Predator vs. Teletubbies, 2011.

Fig 4.70 Jesper and Madeleine, Untitled. N.D.

Fig 4.71 Moose-Spesh, Secret Footage/Ragdoll Secrets, N.D.

Fig 4.72 Andrew Parker, Over the hills and far away, Teletubbies' home is in disarray, The Sun, 29 July, 2002.

13 Introduction

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14 As the hotel room door closes the air seems to go with it —a long slow swoosh. Click, and then — shut. The attentive listener needs time to discern discreet elements in the audio field; the air conditioning hums; the up-down rush of distant elevators; a bar fridge vibrating inside a wood-look cabinet; a rattle in a grill near the ceiling; a soft knock on a distant door.

Between the basic no-frills motel and the world-within-a-world expansiveness of resort destinations there is a category of accommodation pitched at travellers who want little more than comfortable beds, cable TV and breakfast. We check in for a hotel’s most basic function – a place to rest, zone out — to sleep. By the side of the bed is an invitation to record our impressions. This is a hotel – we can sleep perhaps, but can we dream?

The generic tower block, one of the interlocking geometric units of the contemporary cityscape, is typically found clustered in business districts, adjacent to airport highways or located conveniently near freeway rest stops. Their domestic cousins, the residential tower block, rise from reclaimed waste ground and decommissioned industrial sites. Such spaces would not at first seem to suggest the stuff of poetic interpretation but David Toop’s album 37th Floor At Sunset: Music for Mondophrenetic™ [Toop, 2000] reveals that the high rise is a place alive with the possibility of dreaming.

Track titles such as 21st Floor Discotheque at 4am, Air-con Function, Ventilation Shaft and Disposal Chute Inoperative are blank descriptors of familiar locations and situations found in a high rise, yet the soundscapes are anything but didactic. Toop’s music is a shifting field of ambient electronic drones and snippets of voice and music samples. Empty Mall features a short loop of Muzak-like strings lilting in chilly reverb. Many of the tracks shift in density from complex waveforms layered with electronic pulses and digital insects to hissing ambiences. The collage of fragmented voices in Dream Cargoes is layered over the long reverberations of those seemingly source- less noises that rise from an architecture of pre-stressed concrete and glass. Toop’s slowly shifting aural montage is an imagining of a dreamer’s unconscious, tuned out of the waking world, yet tuned in to the effects of sonic sublimity.

15 As an aural experience the listener cannot locate the album’s sounds in the way one might understand the soundtrack of a film seeking to emulate a degree of sonic naturalism, nor is it an experience analogous to an audio documentary using location recordings to build an impression of sonic space. Toop’s album is a realm of aural suggestion that places the listening experience, and by extension the intention of its composer, within a science fictional aesthetic.

How does one account for this impression? For the listener, Toop’s album is recognizable as technological in nature, and we recognise that it is a simulation, and, along with its smooth aural qualities and the suggestive graphic design of the cover art, the album has the high tech aura of SF. But there is something else circulating within its maze of influences and references that connects this work to a much larger consideration of cultural production.

Toop’s album illustrates how many cultural artifacts such as music, art works, television programs, feature films and pop cultural ephemera operate within this zone of the science fictional. The question of how this happens, and what it means, is the basis of this study.

Science + Fiction

To speak of the science fictional is to consider a category of aesthetic effects that are in essence quasi-generic. They are expressions of a process of mimesis, of selective imitation, interpretation and reproduction, all operating within a wider realm of cultural production. These identifiable aesthetic effects are difficult to describe on their own terms because they depend for their existence on a reflective and reflexive relationship with the corpus of what is called the genre of science fiction. To define the science fictional, therefore, one needs to come to terms with the centre. Like those fringe spaces of airport hotels and high-rise apartments, the centre enables the periphery, yet these spaces exist in a manner that might not be recognisable to a citizen of the same city.

16 Let’s consider then for a moment the term “science fiction.”

SCIENCE FICTION

On the left hand – Science – rational, measurable, quantifiable. On the right – Fiction – a construction, a mode of address, a device for relating events that are, to various degrees, untrue. The term itself, argues critic Damien Broderick, is “a zeugma - [a] rhetorical yoking, apparently unnatural or at least against the grain, of two quite different terms into one condensed and startling configuration” [Broderick, 2000: 10]. In science fiction, the zeugmatic ellipsis implies a spatial relationship between what is known and what is supposed, between the rationally understood and what is imagined. Into this speculative cultural space we can launch our thought probe, a deep culture research mission to collect and analyse data from the artifacts we find there.

Istvan Csieser-Ronay Jr. argues that this is a cultural space created by two linked “hesitations”. SF names not a generic effects engine so much as

...a mode of awareness, characterized by […] a pair of gaps. One gap extends between, on the one hand, belief that certain ideas and images of scientific-technological transformations of the world can be entertained, and, on the other, the rational recognition that they may be realized [...] In its other aspect, SF names the gap between, belief in the immanent possibility (and perhaps inexorable necessity) of those transformations, and reflection about their possible ethical, social, and spiritual interpretations. [Csieser-Ronay, 1999: 387-88].

When Jean Baudrillard writes that “There is no real and no imaginary except at a certain distance” [Baudrillard, 1991: 309-13] he is speaking of the same conceptual space. Admittedly, in typical Baudrillardian fashion, he is describing a crisis of contraction. “What happens when this distance, even the one separating the real from the imaginary, begins to disappear and to be absorbed by the model alone?” asks Baudrillard. “Currently, from one order of simulacra to the next, we are witnessing the reduction and absorption of this distance, of this separation which permits a space for ideal or critical projection…” [Baudrillard, 1991: 309-13].

17 Csieser-Ronay describes a steady-state relationship, gaps that are maintained by cultural custom and belief, speculation and formulation, while Baudrillard suggests imminent collapse as the real assumes the aura of the fictional. Both views are potentially reconciled by the formulation of the science fictional as the name of a dialectical cultural space that is continually contracting and expanding that, like the contraction of science fiction to SF, absorb influences and exchanges via the otherwise identifiable generic sub-categories of science fiction, while simultaneously expressing the inherent uncertainties within this realm of the marginal. This study proposes that the cultural space of the science fictional has both identifiable features and a dynamic interchange. In the first instance, the thematics of the most familiar forms of SF — literature and cinema — radiate through popular culture, evidenced in the rise and fall and rise again of identifiable trends; we might consider for example the spate of eco-catastrophe films of the last decade, or the popularity of the undead – zombies and vampires that have populated film and television programs for more than a decade — or the ontological mysteries played out in a long sequence of films from John Frankenheimer’s Seconds [1966] through to Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly [2006]. These examples have numerous further expressions in both film and literature, but also in art and music, advertising and fashion.

This study argues that these exchanges are affected by a second stratum of effects, namely, the speculative notion that culture is a medium through which ideas and concepts move, dynamically altered by the processes of reverberation, density and resonance. With reverberation in the cultural sphere we find ideas being reflected back to us, altered by various culturally specific factors that determine the retransmission of an idea, but now altered and exotic; the density of cultural artifacts is a measure of the degree to which certain themes or tropes achieve critical mass and then, like the warping of space time by gravity, their density increases the ability of a cultural artifact to effect another through influence, reference and citation; and finally, resonance is a metaphor for the manner in which iterations of historical theory and philosophy have been manifested in contemporary culture, to us evidence of the zeitgeist but also a reception of a long wave transmission from the roots of Western culture to the residents of the future. The morning air is clear as our thought probe blasts off into culture space. We huddle around the screens awaiting the first data transmission.

18 High Rise

Toop’s album did indeed have some very specific references to the science fictional. The music was originally composed to accompany an installation piece Mondophrenetic™ created by a trio of collaborating artists in 2000 that was exhibited in Belgium, Holland and Brazil [Opsomer, 2000]. Conceived as a non-linear listening experience, each of Toop’s ‘tracks’ would be heard in any order, overlapping and merging with other tracks as the gallery visitor walked around the gallery space viewing photographs of high-rise buildings. For Toop, the music was to be suggestive of buildings as living organisms, creatures with nervous systems:

In his novel, High Rise, J.G. Ballard described the subtle relationship of an apartment block's nervous system to the disintegrating ecology of the mini- society of its inhabitants. Apartment blocks look much the same, whether in China or the suburbs of Paris, yet the lives within them are very different. The sounds of lift shafts, ventilation and heating systems, the murmurs of human activity, radio and television, have a universality that becomes specific only in the finest details, a moment in time at the right place, maybe through the walls of the 37th floor at sunset [Toop, 2009].

Toop’s desire was to create a soundscape that suggested globalism and the absorption of cultures, an uneasy listening mix that would be “detached from any recognisable source other than the perpetual movement of hybridised culture in the 21st century” [Toop, 2009]. That Toop cites Ballard’s 1975 science fiction novel High Rise, and that many of the images created for the installation by the artist Els Opsomer referenced Jean Luc Godard’s feature film Two Or Three Things I Know About Her [1967] places both soundtrack and installation piece into a critical context, that in turn suggests an historical dialogue between modernist and postmodern forms, modes of address and thematic concerns. In essence, Toop’s work describes a space of speculation and reflection that is both familiar and strange, a global cultural space that Frederic Jameson described as a “vast, decentred complexity” where the “impossible totality of the contemporary world system” [Jameson, 1991: 38] is made manifest in the flickering aesthetics of now. Let’s now look to the past to discover how we arrived in the present.

19 20

Fig 1.1 Ward Shelley, The History of Science Fiction V.1, 2009. Oil colour and toner on Mylar, 137x76cm. This page: Detail. Collection: The Artist.

21 Defining Science Fiction

In 2009 the artist Ward Shelley produced a flow chart that laid out the entire history of science fiction, from pre-history to its very recent past [Fig. 1.1]. Looking much like the exposed guts of a huge beast, this splayed history begins in the ancient world with Fear and Wonder evolving into Animism and Legends, while another pair of extrusions grows outwards from Philosophy and Art. Shelley’s chart explodes after the Enlightenment with yet more strands from The Counter Enlightenment to the Anti- Rational, then to the Romantic Novel to The Gothic Novel before splitting off into genres such as Westerns, Detective Fiction, Horror and Fantasy — while Science gives birth to the Science Adventure and Fantasy Adventure as The Pulp Era begets Space Opera, Hard SF and on to their cinematic and televisual offspring. At the end of the 20th century we see influential sub-genres emerging such as Cyberpunk in the 1980s and the New Space Opera of the 1990s while the most recent examples on the television/cinema bulb are Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and Wall-E, and on the literary SF side we find Michael Chabon’s alternate history The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Ursula K. Le Guin’s quasi-fantasy novel Powers.

It is an overview that manages to bring together much of the standard story of science fiction. “History of Science Fiction is a graphic chronology that maps the literary genre from its nascent roots in mythology and fantastic stories to the somewhat calcified post-Star Wars space opera epics of today,” writes Shelley. “Science fiction progressed through a number of distinct periods, which are charted, citing hundreds of the most important works and authors” [Shelley, 2011]. Shelley’s chart is a history with a particularly American point of view; French author Jules Verne is duly noted but Georges Méliès film Le Voyage dans la lune [1902] — often cited as an important early film and a precursor to modern science fiction cinema – is inexplicably left out. Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris appears as an addendum marooned at the top of the chart at the end of the 1970s but no other Eastern European, Russian or Soviet era SF is included save Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaption of Solaris [1972], while the massively influential Japanese contribution to the genre from the cinema of Godzilla [1954] to the anime of Ghost in

22 The Shell: Innocence [2004] is missing. Regardless of these omissions, Shelley’s history provides us with a useful road map, tracing the genre’s roots and developments while charting its many diverging paths through modernity.

There is, however, a problem. The term “science fiction” wasn’t invented until April 1926. The term was coined by the Luxembourg-born American magazine publishing impresario and occasional SF writer Hugo Gernsback to describe the kinds of stories that could be found in the pages of his brand new title Amazing Stories, “the first true science fiction magazine in English” [Edwards, 1999: 490]. Gernsback had previously tried out a couple of variations: in a special edition of Science & Invention in August 1923 he coined “scientific fiction” but a year later in 1924 he road tested the rather cumbersome “scientifiction” for a short-lived magazine of the same name. Finally, for the launch issue of Amazing Stories Gernsback settled on “science fiction”. It wasn’t just a description of a type of fiction — it was also an editorial policy. As Gary Westfahl notes, Gernsbackian SF “juxtaposed narrative with explanations of scientific fact and detailed descriptions of proposed inventions” [Westfahl, 2002: 20]. The Amazing Stories style of SF held that scientific accuracy wasn’t nearly as important as inspiring readers through tales of wonder, awe and amazement. Gernsback’s magazine helped create “a form of science fiction that reduced science to jargon and nonsense and emphasized exciting adventures, at times mixed with adolescent eroticism” a form of fiction “we now call space opera” [Westfahl, 2002: 20].

At the height of the Pulp Era of SF magazine publishing from the 1930s through to the late 1950s other magazines appeared and offered a challenge to the Gernsbackian definition of SF. In the 1940s John W. Campbell’s competing title Astounding Science Fiction emphasized “careful scientific extrapolation and logic” and this “became what we call hard science fiction” [Westfahl, 2002: 20-21]. The ‘50s saw a more urbane form of SF appear, characterized by the humour, satire and literary fiction that appeared in Galaxy magazine, while avant-garde and experimental stylings flourished in the UK’s New Worlds magazine during the 1960s and ‘70s [Westfahl, 2002: 20-21].

Shelley’s diagram records this tangle of intersecting and competing ideas about science fiction, but it is clear that the use of the term “science fiction” to describe its pre-20th century roots, even for a period as historically recent as the late 19th century,

23 is a revisionist formulation. For the purposes of our study we need to be able to define “science fiction” so that we might better understand its quasi-generic manifestations in contemporary culture.

Genre and History

A brief tour through some competing views about the roots of science fiction offers us an insight into how, even today, debate continues as to what constitutes science fiction and what might be considered its essential features. As Carl Freedman writes in Critical Theory and Science Fiction “it is symptomatic of the complexity of science fiction that critical discussion of it tends to devote considerable attention to the problem of definition” [Freedman, 2000: 13]. Freedman describes a host of approaches, from broad to narrow to eulogistic and dyslogistic, comparative literature studies of the language of realist fiction in relation to genre-specific usages in fantasy and SF, to anti-definitions that “proclaim the problem of definition to be insoluble” [Freedman, 2000: 13].

All definitions of SF inevitably lead to a speculative history. Brian W. Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree: A History of Science Fiction [1973] proved to be one of the more influential studies of the genre’s history, offering both a workable definition and a starting point. Aldiss argued that “Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in a Gothic or post-Gothic mould” [Aldiss, 1973: 8]. Aldiss wrote that much pre-modern and ancient literature were “recognisably akin to science fiction; that voyages of discovery, mythical adventures, fantastic beasts, and symbolic happenings are part of a grand tradition of storytelling which the realistic novel of society has only recently been rejected” [Aldiss, 1973: 9- 10]. Into this lineage Aldiss places the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hindu mythology, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Bible. Because of the generic requirement of ‘advanced knowledge’, these examples are precursors rather than ancestors of the modern form.

Aldiss mounts a persuasive case for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus as the beginning of modern SF. The novel’s publication in 1818 came at a time of great social transformation, from the industrial revolution to the French and

24 American revolutions of the late 18th century, to speculations on evolution and natural selection to the influential theories of the sublime posited by Edmund Burke and, not least, to the Romantic and Gothic poets, novelists and painters whose work provided a backdrop and influence upon Shelley’s novel. “Mary had imbibed the scientific ideas of [Erasmus] Darwin and [Percy] Shelley, had heard what they had to say about the future; and now set about applying her findings within the loose framework of the Gothic novel” [Aldiss, 1973: 21]. Science fiction, argues Aldiss, shares story telling methods and stylistic traits with Gothic fiction – from settings that evoke a sense of the “distant and the unearthly” to figures from Gothic fiction such as the villainous Monk reconfigured as the alien visitor in SF, to locations in the new world [Australia, America] reimagined as extra-solar worlds circling distant suns [Aldiss, 1973: 19]. Shelley’s novel reflected contemporary philosophical, political and scientific thought, “combing social criticism with new scientific ideas, while conveying a picture of her own day […] Shelley [anticipated] the methods of H.G. Wells when writing his scientific romances, and some of the authors that followed him” [Aldiss, 1973: 19].

The SF critic and historian Adam Roberts argues that it was within this combination of theme, setting, character and narrative that Shelley’s novel qualifies as SF. “It is in the detailed manifestation of the beautiful strangeness of the monster that the book strikes home,” writes Roberts. “Its central character, who is also its novum, functions as an embodiment of alterity” [Roberts, 2006: 43]. The term ‘novum’ here refers to a ‘novelty or innovation validated by cognitive logic’ — a speculative concept that, within the context of a narrative, seems plausible. The term ‘novum’ derives from the work of SF theorist Darko Suvin, whose concept of SF we will discuss below, but for now let’s consider the idea that Frankenstein’s monster is both a character and a concept whose presence can only be justified by the logic of the story itself. Roberts argues that Shelley foregrounded “‘the imagination’ as the key artistic faculty” which can be read as “‘the creative entering into the possibilities of the fantastic, the unknown and the other-than-the-everyday’, together with the awe-inspiring splendour of the sublime which today is what is sometimes called ‘sense of wonder SF’ that established the framework within which all modern SF writers work” [Roberts, 2006: 42].

25 It would seem then that Frankenstein is a logical starting point for modern SF. But as a number of critics have argued, the social context and speculative nature of Shelley’s novel were not unprecedented. “I could list several hundred science- fictional works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” claims Roberts. “But in many ways the interesting thing about them […] is that so few critics of SF are prepared to include them in their histories of the genre” [Roberts, 2006:41]. Ultimately, Roberts argues, personal taste is a guiding principle in what constitutes a precursor — to talk in a meaningful way about the history of SF “must mean to talk of constituent texts that possess cultural resonance” [Roberts, 2006:41]. For many critics Shelley’s Frankenstein is just that text, a text that powers the study of early SF, and of Gothic literature, of theories of the body, of abjection, the undead and the uncanny.

A counter argument is worth considering here and, although it might seem to be a matter of degree rather than a radical realignment, the particulars of the debate point to a very different history of SF. Thomas M. Disch’s The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered The World posits an alternate beginning. “Poe is the source,” the author boldly claims [Disch, 2000: 34]. Aldiss’s arguments for Shelley’s novel are dismissed as “merely theoretical” and further, since so many more people know the story and its themes from film adaptations than from having read the actual book, this suggests to Disch “a failure of Mary Shelley to do justice to her theme. An unread author is no one’s intellectual ancestor” [Disch, 2000: 32]. Disch takes great offence at T.S. Eliot’s suggestion that Poe had the equivalent intellect and talent of “a highly gifted young person before puberty” [Eliot in Disch, 2000: 35] and from this Disch extrapolated a high culture vs. low culture battle between the high-minded poetry of Eliot and the low-brow populism of SF: “What Eliot says of Poe can be said, in much the same terms as science fiction as a genre” [Disch, 2000: 35].

Disch’s claim for Poe rests as much on Poe’s position as a populist writer as it does on the evidence of his writing. “Poe is the source, because people read his stories,” claims Disch. Instead of the unread, unloved classics, or dry contemporary English poetry, Poe was an author in touch with his audience: “[Poe] represents a vein of modernism that is antithetical to that of Eliot and compeers; one addressed not to the highly literate audience of university dons but to a much wider readership; one that

26 revelled in excess, in downright bad taste just for the fun of it; one that adapted its art to the conditions of the marketplace without qualms, candidly motivated (as the poor commonly are) by the desire to earn money; and, finally, a modernism more interested in the future than the past, as one might expect of art tailored to a nation of immigrants” [Disch, 2000: 36-37].

The evidence for Poe’s writing as the “source” of modern SF is found in two short stories, Mesmeric Revelations [1844] and The Facts in The Case of M. Vlademar [1845]. They are science fiction by virtue of their subject – mesmerism – and the manner of their execution – both stories were written in the language of popular science reporting of the day:

The appearance of scientific objectivity is crucial to such impostures, since it was science after all, that first displaced faith by casting doubt on a literal subterranean hell and a celestial heaven, such as Dante depicted. Poetic justice demands that science should assist at the resurrection of the afterlife, and Poe, with prophetic genius found just the science to do it justice: mesmerism [Disch 2000: 41].

Although mesmerism had been debunked at the time of writing, Poe, through an artful combination of writerly technique, pseudoscientific explanation and dramatic license, convinces the reader of these apparent first-hand testimonies of life after death. “There, in that marvellous conflation of wish fulfillment, pop theology and pseudoscientific persiflage is all science fiction in a nutshell – and, intrinsic to it, the better part of American Pop Culture to come” [Disch, 2000: 43]. Within science fiction literary circles Disch’s argument was met with a degree of skepticism and, in many cases, outright hostility. This was due in part to the fact that Disch’s claims for Poe were contained in a polemical book that Carl Freedman characterised as engagingly written but also “sloppy, ignorant, obtuse, and offensive” [Freedman, 1999: 324]. Disch’s claim that Mary Shelley’s book was unread by modern audiences were dismissed (“The American version of Books in Print currently lists more than 50 editions of Frankenstein alone” [Freedman, 1999: 324]) but a more egregious problem was the absence of a definition of science fiction:

No analytic or literary-critical definition of the term is ever offered - indeed, no

27 explicit definition at all. Often, Disch seems to be assuming a marketing definition-that is, science fiction is whatever publishing houses or film studios or television networks say is science fiction, including everything from Ballard's Crash (1973) to H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) to the old Captain Video TV programs [Freedman, 1999: 325].

On the one hand, Aldiss defines science fiction as an attempt to construct a workable epistemology; an ongoing process defined as “science”, and elaborates a case for Shelley’s novel Frankenstein as a starting point. On the other hand, Disch makes much the same case for Poe and his short stories but with a significant difference – any definition of science fiction must take into account the context of time, place and, crucially, the collaborative nature of an author’s audience in the creation of the text’s meaning. These two positions are not irreconcilable, and indeed, aside from disagreement about particular examples, they are in agreement – Shelley and Poe inscribed a romantic imagination into the “science” of their times. This, however, does not actually define science fiction in a way that feels entirely comfortable. The reliance on a historically traceable ancestor has a tendency to subjective interpretation and willful exclusion. Perhaps there is another way of thinking about the genre of science fiction.

Genre and Effect

Beginning in the late 1970s a significant shift in science fiction scholarship occurred, questions of historical antecedents began to be replaced by issues of function and effect. Literary theorist Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction proposed in 1979 describes the action of a science-fictional text, and its influence.

According to Suvin, “Science fiction is a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework, alternative to the author’s environment” [Suvin, 1979: 7-8]. Suvin’s theory of “cognition” suggests “the seeking of rational understanding” while “estrangement” is “something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt … a ‘representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognise its subject but at the same time make it unfamiliar’” [Clute, Nichols, Stableford, 1999: 313].

28 A key aspect of Suvin’s theory of SF is the concept of the novum. As mentioned previously, the novum is literally “the new thing” that crystalises the “difference between the world of fiction and … the real world outside” [Clute, Nichols, Stableford, 1999: 313]. Frankenstein’s monster is one example of a novum, mesmerism is another, so too spacecraft, time machines or any other fictional reality made strange by the addition of a counter-intuitive yet plausible narrative mechanism that allows the functioning of the story itself. Suvin’s conception of science fiction is as a set of inter-related narrative mechanisms that rely on the audience’s ability to recognise that mechanism without fully understanding how it works. In this sense, “science” is much as Aldiss defined it — an advanced, if confused, state of knowledge.

Suvin’s theory also suggests a dialectic between estrangement and cognition. As Freedman argues:

[Estrangement] refers to the creation of an alternative fictional world that, by refusing to take our mundane environment for granted, implicitly performs an estranging critical interrogation of the latter. But the critical character of the interrogation is guaranteed by the operation of cognition, which enables the science-fictional text to account rationally for its imagined world and for the connections as well as the disconnections of the latter to our own empirical world [Freedman, 2000: 16-17].

According to Freedman, without estrangement this dialectic results in realist fiction whereas without cognition “the result is fantasy, which estranges, or appears to estrange, but in an irrational … way” [Freedman, 2000: 17]. Freedman takes issue with Suvin’s theory on the basis that, beyond straightforward examples of more-or- less pure genre SF or Fantasy, certain ideas, themes and tropes are hard to justify as cognitively valid. For example, can stories contain, as their novum, the concept of parallel universes and still be considered plausible? “The crucial issue for generic discrimination is not any epistemological judgment external to the text itself on [the question of] rationality or irrationality … but rather the attitude of the text itself to the kind of estrangements being performed” [Freedman, 2000: 18]. In other words, the context of the novum is crucial – presented in a rational, realist manner even apparently counter intuitive devices can be considered “scientific”.

The problem with attempting to locate and classify the entire science fiction genre based on a single historical example is made manifest by Aldiss and Disch. Suvin’s

29 definition, by contrast, posits SF in very different terms, claiming a relationship between an author and an audience through which a shared understanding of what rational fictive representations might occur. Instead of a text containing thematic cues that determine its designation as genre or non-genre, a SF text “is not filed under a generic category; instead a generic tendency is something that happens within a text” [Freedman, 2000: 20].

Science Fiction and Contemporaneity

One of the key aspects of science fiction is its relationship to notions of the present. Suvin’s novum is often posited as something that will take place in the future. That “future” however is an uncertain and unresolved set of ideas about the present. “Science fiction is a historical literature because the theoretical act or the imaginative act that you perform is to postulate some kind of a future,” argued SF author Kim Stanley Robinson. “The thing that makes it other than fantasy is the inclusion of a history connecting that future back to our present moment” [Robinson in Davidson, 2007]. The genre’s most convincing moments of mimesis occur in that connection and SF stages this relationship in a variety of ways. Stories of the future – from the near to far future — allow for myriad projections of technologies, social relationships and contexts that may co-exist within one diegetic frame. In cinema for example, these can range from the near future dystopias of Blade Runner [Scott, 1982] or Children of Men [Cuarón, 2006], to the satires of Sleeper [Allen, 1973] or Idiocracy [Judge, 2006], in the “future past” science fantasies of the Star Wars sequence [Lucas, 1977-2005], the new space opera of Battlestar Galactica [Ryman, Nankin, Hardy et al, 2004-09] or the revisionist planetary romance of John Carter [Stanton, 2012].

The “future” is also something that takes place in the present. Shelley’s Frankenstein was not set in the future, but added to its present day the ability to reanimate dead body parts. Everything else in the world of the novel was as it would have been in 1818. The alteration of the present by the intrusion of a speculative “future” moment remains a vital part of the genre, particularly in SF cinema, where films such as Roland Emmerich’s ecstatic fantasies of global destruction such as Independence Day [1996] and 2012 [2009] to the more contemplative low budget SF films such as Primer [Carruth, 2004], Monsters [Edwards, 2010] or Another Earth [Cahill, 2011] rely

30 for their estrangement on a sense of convincing contemporaneity disrupted by the intrusion of the novum.

Sub-genres of literary and cinematic SF such as alternative history – historical fictions that postulate different pasts, novels such as Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt [2003] that imagined a Medieval Europe decimated by the Black Plague that in turn allowed the rise and domination of modern world by the East, or Philip K. Dick’s The Man in The High Castle [1962] which postulated an alternate present world that arose after the Allies were defeated in World War 2 – do not rely on any technological novum to place us into these alternate presents, rather their sense of estrangement is achieved in much the same way the “future” is suggested, that is, an exotic alteration of the known.

Istvan Csieser-Ronay Jr. argues that, “SF embeds scientific-technological concepts in the sphere of human interests and actions, explaining them and explicitly attributing social value to them” [Csieser-Ronay, 1991: 387]. This, as we have seen above, may take many forms, but, Csieser-Ronay argues:

[Science fiction] is an inherently, and radically, future-oriented process, since the exact ontological status of the fictive world is suspended. Unlike historical fiction (of which SF is a direct heir), where a less intense suspense operates because the outcome of the past is still in the process of being completed in the present’s partisan conflicts, SF is suspended because all the relevant information about the future has not been created yet, and never can be. […] Since SF is concerned mainly with the role of science and technology in defining human—i.e., cultural—value, there can be as many kinds of SF as there are theories of culture. [Csieser-Ronay, 1991: 387].

Genre Distortion

Modernism came late to literary SF. The New Wave of the 1960s rejected the “hard” science fiction of spaceships and intergalactic travel for the imaginative possibilities of contemporary society, finding within the texture of every day life, in high-rise buildings, freeways and cityscapes, and within the human body, ideas and themes more startling and disturbing than the most lurid 1950s style SF fantasies of alien

31 invasion, bodily possession or global destruction. Experimental forms such as collage novels and stream of consciousness narratives were conjoined with the formerly taboo subjects of sex, drugs, politics and feminism and — inspired by an often-ironic conflation of classic SF genre tropes with pop culture, the art world and cinema — the New Wave was born.

In the UK, the New Wave was centred on editor and author Michael Moorcock’s tenure as editor of New Worlds between 1964 and 1970. “Moorcock’s aim, stated in his first editorial, was to redefine SF not as ‘science fiction’ but as the more inclusive category ‘speculative fantasy’ and with this to promise nothing less than ‘an important revitalisation of the literary mainstream’” [Luckhurst, 2005: 141-142]. New Wave authors such as J.G. Ballard, John Sladek, Thomas M. Disch, John Brunner and Moorcock himself set about establishing SF as a genuinely avant garde literature. Critic Roger Luckhurst characterises SF’s New Wave as a cultural force that ran counter to the triumphalism of Western capitalist societies in the 1960s, a “refusal of the shiny promise of technological modernity” in which “New Wave echoed the other cultural avant gardes of the time, exploding in theatre, cinema, fine art and the novel” [Luckhurst, 2005: 143]. New Wave in the US was centred not on a magazine, but on the publication of several influential anthologies. After critic and anthologist Judith Merril published England Swings SF [1965], which brought together early UK New Wave writing, self-styled enfant terrible Harlan Ellison edited the anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967 which he hoped would trigger a paradigm shift within the genre: “What you hold in your hands is more than a book. If we are lucky, it is a revolution” [Ellison, quoted in Luckhurst, 2005: 142].

The legacy of the New Wave remains the subject of debate within SF’s literary circles, as is the extent of its influence and importance in its own time, but its short life served to destabilise what had been, since its conception in the 1920s, a varied but relatively homogenous genre. The revolutions of the New Wave were as much about the elimination of generic borders as they were about formal innovation; by emulating and adapting the sorts of stylistic innovations established by literary modernism in the early decades of the 20th century the dominant realist mode of SF would be challenged, subverted or even replaced by the new style — in Moorcock’s view, New Wave SF would revitalise mainstream literature, while in Ellison’s the mainstream could be replaced. The longer-term effect of New Wave was to put a

32 permanent question mark on the limits of the genre of science fiction. Two examples serve to illustrate the current state of play and the uncertainty at the heart of the SF genre.

There have been a number of recent proclamations of new forms of SF that share the experimental adventurousness of the New Wave, but each has had very different views of its relationship to SF, and to mainstream literature, and to wider culture. One notable attempt at defining an edge zone for SF, a place where literary fiction and SF might meet on equal terms, is found in Bruce Sterling’s 1989 essay for the magazine SF Eye. Of this new form of writing Sterling wrote that:

This genre is not category SF; it is not even “genre” SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a “sense of wonder” or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction. Instead, this is a kind of writing, which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of a Postmodern Sensibility… for the sake of convenience and argument; we will call these books “slipstream”. [Sterling, quoted in Kelly, 2006: iix].

Slipstream named what in the mid to late 1980s was an emergent tendency within SF: postmodernism. Sterling, who along with William Gibson had been identified as one of the central figures of the emergence of the Cyberpunk subgenre of SF in the early 1980s, staked out an area of culture making that crossed over from SF into the mainstream, but crucially, from the mainstream to SF as well. Larry McCaffrey’s seminal anthology Storming The Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Post Modern Science Fiction [1991] charted authors of literary fiction whose work bore the influence of, or made reference to, science fiction. Precursors included Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star (1976) and White Noise (1986), William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), and Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990), among others. Wrote McCaffrey:

While writing outside the commercial SF publishing scene, these writers produced works that perfectly fulfill the generic task of SF … These

33 mainstream works … typically portrayed individuals awash in a sea of technological change, information overload, and random—but extraordinarily vivid—sensory stimulation. Personal confusion, sadness, dread, and philosophical skepticism often appeared mixed with equal measures of euphoria and nostalgia for a past when centers could still hold [McCaffrey, 1991: 11].

Science fiction had long been a referential genre, self consciously drawing on its history of themes and ideas, settings and tropes as a way of placing a text within the genre’s defining limits, but also as a way of dealing afresh with familiar conceptual territory. SF historian and critic Veronica Hollinger argues that, under the influence of postmodernism, “the borders of genre have become porous, [and] impossible to police against the constant incursions of texts that are not quite the ‘real thing’” [Hollinger, 2005: 245]. Hollinger uses the term “real thing” here to denote hybrid texts where their aesthetic approaches or subject matter ruled them out as examples of classical science fiction. Yet these exceptions described a zone of the science fictional where hybridization are the norm: “Examples of such ‘exceptions’ abound in science fiction today, texts composed of various mismatched features that, like Frankenstein’s Creature, are neither one thing or the other and which, in the eyes of the purists, should probably be driven out of the genre community altogether” [Hollinger, 2005: 245].

The expansion of SF from its more familiar generic forms into a quasi-mainstream literature remains a continuing project at the edges of SF. The past decade has seen the rise and fall of numerous sub-genres that have, in varying modes, attempted to revive the New Wave spirit – from Rudy Rucker’s plea for an SF avant garde dubbed “Transrealism” [Rucker, 1983-99] to Geoff Ryman’s proselytizing for a “Mundane SF” to counter the proliferation of space opera [Ryman, 2007] to Douglas Coupland’s “Translit” that, like McCaffrey and many others before him, attempts to name the here-and-now cultural moment in quasi-SF terms [Coupland, 2012]. While these arguments for SF’s status and relationship to mainstream literature, and to culture, serve to energize the SF community, debate over definition has infected even the most staid of its sub-genres – space opera. The term “space opera” was coined in 1941 by SF author Wilson Tucker to describe the “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn spaceship yarn” [Nichols, 1999: 1138] that had come to dominate pulp SF and was widely defined as stories that involved space adventures and battles, starships, high

34 action and drama — and scant scientific plausibility. Space opera proved to be one of the most durable of all SF’s subgenres. From E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Skylark and Lensman series of the 1920s and ‘30s, through Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy of the 1940s, and onwards to various tributes, pastiches and parodies of the 1960s and ‘70s, to its reinvention in the 1990s as New Space Opera, the sub genre prospered. The commercial success of George Lucas’s Star Wars film series beginning in the late 1970s, and through the various incarnations of Star Trek – [from the original TV series of 1966-69, through ten subsequent feature films, TV sequels and spinoffs, all the way to the “reboot” of Star Trek in 2009] – not to mention all the numerous TV programs “inspired” by the phenomenal commercial success of both properties – demonstrate that space opera was not just successful, but had come to popularly define SF itself.

Although space opera as a sub genre has persisted what “space opera” actually denotes has radically altered since the 1940s. Writing in the forward to the anthology The Space Opera Renaissance, editors David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer argue that a distinct cultural amnesia effects SF literature and culture; from a pejorative dismissal of the most complacent and tired aspects of the genre, “space opera” has been completely revised to become a term lacking any negative connotations whatsoever [Hartwell & Cramer, 2006]. Not only is its embarrassing early history embraced, the appellation is now applied to a revisionist contemporary version that embraces its apparent failings as ironic sub-genre trappings. The reasons for this amnesia — and the long and twisting history of the space opera subgenre itself — is fascinating, but well outside the scope of this study. What is interesting here, however, is that even something as essential to SF as space opera is far from defined or even continuous. Like the borderlands of SF, the centre of the genre is open to interpretation, a mirage of mis-understandings and fluid definitions.

The Science Fiction of Theory

Sterling’s formulation of Slipstream in 1989 coincided with the emergence of what was dubbed “the SF of theory” [Csieser-Ronay, 1991; 400]. Csieser-Ronay argued that Jean Baudrillard’s Precession of Simulacra [1981] and Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late

35 Twentieth Century [1985] were emblematic of a melding of discourses that constituted the ‘science fictionalization’ of critical theory. Argued Csieser-Ronay, “SF has become a form of discourse that directly engages postmodern language and culture and has (for the moment at least) a privileged position because of its generic interest in the intersection of technology, scientific theory, and social practice” [Csieser-Ronay, 1991; 388]. The postmodern conception of SF suggested by, or explicitly explored in, the work of theorists including Jean François Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, Vivian Sobchack, Baudrillard, Haraway, and numerous others, was of a genre that embodied both high and low culture, high seriousness and pop cultural relevance, and was a metagenre that, in its articulation of Western society’s conscious fears and subconscious desires, was both a representative for, and a representation of, Western culture itself. As Sobchack put it, science fiction offered an understanding of “the cognitive mapping and poetic figuration of social relations as these are constituted by new technological modes of ‘being-in-the-world”‘ [Sobchack, in McCaffrey, 1991: 11].

The “SF of theory” offered critics and theorists a means of engagement with pop cultural phenomena and its artifacts – predominantly film and literature, but also, on occasion, music and visual art – in the mode of speculative fiction. These engagements represented the panoply of postmodernist concerns but three brief examples serve to demonstrate the breadth and evolution of this critical discourse.

An influential special issue of the journal Science Fiction Studies — Science Fiction and Post Modernism [November, 1991] – published a 1976 two-part essay by Jean Baudrillard entitled Simulacra and Science Fiction. Baudrillard’s three orders of simulacra posited a progression of culture from a first stage of representation that was “harmonious, optimistic” that aimed “at the reconstitution […] of a nature in God’s image” [Baudrillard, 1991: 309]. The second order of was “based on energy and force, materialized by the machine and the entire system of production” being an attempt at “world-wide application, continuous expansion, liberation of indeterminate energy” [Baudrillard, 1991: 309]. Science fiction belonged to this second order, embracing the ideal of unlimited expansion via technological instrumentality. The third order of simulacra was the state of the world under the reign of the model based upon “information, the model, cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality hyperreality, total control” [Baudrillard, 1991: 309]. The effect of this third stage was to capture and entwine the twin disciplines: “Both traditional SF and theory are

36 destined to the same fate: flux and imprecision are putting an end to them as specific genres” [Baudrillard, 1991: 309].

Baudrillard argued that SF enacted both estrangement and cognition – on the one hand reproducing Suvin’s displacement effects and, on the other, SF illustrated a dissolution of the real that was occurring at an accelerated pace beyond the borders of the genre:

Perhaps the SF of this era of cybernetics and hyperreality will only be able to attempt to "artificially" resurrect the "historical" worlds of the past, trying to reconstruct in vitro and down to its tiniest details the various episodes of by gone days: events, persons, defunct ideologies-all now empty of meaning and of their original essence, but hypnotic with retrospective truth. Like the Civil War in Philip K. Dick's The Simulacra like a gigantic hologram in three dimensions, where fiction will never again be a mirror held to the future, but rather a desperate rehallucinating of the past [Baudrillard, 1991: 312].

Baudrillard’s text would seem to anticipate the proliferation of alternate reality/identity SF films – a key SF sub genre of the last two decades – if it were not for his own influence upon this development, an influence that found its dubious apotheosis when the author’s Simulacra & Simulations [1981] was conspicuously sited in The Matrix [Wachowski Bros, 1999]. Instead, Baudrillard had presciently suggested the use of cutting edge computer generated imagery to create convincing visions of the past, from the alternative-history-Nazi-resistance fantasy of Valkyrie [Singer, 2008], to the disaster/time-travel-by-memory epic of Titanic [Cameron, 1997], to the intrigues of Ancient Rome reenacted as revenge melodrama in Gladiator [Scott, 2000].

Baudrillard’s theory, from the generalized engagement with the mode of science fictional speculation in his critical theory, to the study of specific SF texts by J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick in Simulacra and Science Fiction, represents one of the foundations of postmodern SF. Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [1984] represents another. As Veronica Hollinger notes, Postmodernism… was Jameson’s classic “annunciation of our contemporary cultural dominant, [a book] which can claim to have constructed many current ideas about the postmodern even as it set out to map them” [Hollinger, 1999: 257]. Further, Jameson’s position suggested that the collapse of generic boundaries – and the

37 notions of high and low culture - had made the demarcation of SF from the notional ‘mainstream’ of Western culture exceedingly problematic, while the erasure of the past in favour of a perpetual — if chimerical — present was:

a cultural "fall" into a kind of surface-model spatiality. In the terms of Jameson's critique, the future itself, like the past, seems to have been placed under a kind of erasure, a construction which has at least theoretical ramifications for SF as a future-oriented literary genre. In the ‘final’ analysis, for Jameson, ‘every position on postmodernism in culture... is also a tone and at the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today’ [Hollinger, 1999: 258].

Jameson’s later Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions [2004] was a more explicit engagement with SF exploring the historical relationship between imagined utopias and social reality. Drawing on the work of Darko Suvin,

Jameson argues that science fiction enables a historicizing of the here and now and thus acquires the capacity to ‘defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present’. In the process, science fiction finds its deepest vocation which is ‘over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future, to body forth […] the ‘atrophy of our time of what Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference’ [Schweighauser, 2007: 586].

Jameson, like Baudrillard, argues that SF is profoundly not of the future but of the present, embodying social relations as a measure of contemporary society, not disconnected from its political imperatives, but driven by them. But where both Jameson and Baudrillard kept at a distance the totalizing aura of the fictional, preferring instead to momentarily embrace certain ideas and concepts of SF rather than the fictive voice of the “future”, subsequent practitioners of the SF-theory were not so reticent.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit [CCRU] was a collective of UK writers, academics and theorists based in the department of philosophy at the University of Warwick. From the mid 1990s until the early 2000s the CCRU staged events,

38 lectures and exhibitions as well as a litany of off-line and on-line texts that attempted to blur the “borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi, and music journalism, … to achieve a kind of nomadic thought that, to use the Deleuze and Guattari term — “deterritorializes” itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism), academic writing that aspires to the future-shock intensity of jungle and other forms of post-rave music” [Reynolds, 2008: 171].

In practice the CCRU’s SF-theory mind-meld was a deliberately schizophrenic discourse that encompassed academic and popular culture, conflating hyperbolic theoryspeak with a self-conscious deployment of “science fiction”. The CCRU’s project was the delirious invocation of SF-theory, or as Simon Reynolds put it, a kind of “mystic materialism”.

The mania of CCRU’s texts – with their mood-blend of euphoric anticipation and dystopian dread – is contagious. Much of the time they’re trying to create a “theory rush” that matches the buzz they get from contemporary sampladelic dance music; they describe, half jokingly, what they do as “sub- bass materialism’ [Reynolds, 2008: 176-177].

In 1998 Kodwo Eshun – a writer/filmmaker associated with the CCRU — had his More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction published, a book that evoked the “theory rush” of the CCRU in a study of ‘black science fiction’ — the counter-culture futurism of musicians such as Sun Ra, Lee Perry and George Clinton, among many others. Writing on the electronic jazz collage of George Russell’s Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved By Nature [1968], Eshun found the science fictional soul of the album:

George Russell’s Electronic Sonata… are auditions of jazz augmented for the unknown hazards of inner space… Russell’s electromagnetic force field falls in a haze as indefinite as a neuromantic sky tuned to the colour of dead TV. The vapour drift of tape hiss seeps through the jagged guitar signals and sax tones, derealizing the borders between live and synthetic noise, and unreal

39 and real time, into colour fields that flip flop at the periphery of perception [Eshun, 1998: 01-04].

The invocation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer [1984] — and its famous opening line of skies tuned to the colour of dead televisions [grey-white static snow, not the AV-in blue of the present day] — is but one of the SF references encoded into the text. Alongside a nod to Giles Deleuze’s notion of schizophrenic- cinematic ‘derealisation’, Eshun references Ballard’s call for a science fiction of inner space. Eshun’s landmark study is a prelude to his next body of work – and our next step toward establishing an understanding of the wide-ranging context of the science fictional.

SF, Contemporary Art & Metaphor

We have discussed science fiction with reference to the theory and practice of SF literature and film, its two culturally dominant forms, but there are discernable traces of SF within contemporary art. The narratives of SF operate in both literal and metaphorical modes – while a narrative may well purport to represent a future [plausible or not] it also suggests a metaphorical reading where the novum stands not for technology but for human experience. For example, in a time travel story where a temporal shift is achieved through the use of a machine, the novum is the machine, yet the concept of time travel might also be read as a metaphor for memory. The SF narrative literalises the metaphor through the novum, but it never fully divests itself of this metaphorical suggestion. The use or representation of technology in contemporary art practice produces a very similar kind of conceptual tension between the literal and the metaphorical. The photographic image, the digital video, the installation work, these typical, generic forms of contemporary art, produce the same sort of reflexive relationships between concept and materiality as science fiction. An understanding of an artwork’s subject is determined as much by the medium as it is by its treatment. For example, the use of video or photography to depict a real or imagined past or future is a fiction of time, and is a transaction between concept and execution predicated on the audience’s understanding of montage or post production effects for the persuasiveness of that fiction. The novum in contemporary art is not always technological in nature – an image of the “future” presented in an oil painting also relies on a shared understanding of that image’s

40 cultural context for its meaning, and its sense of ‘futurity’, while the medium itself is essentially pre-modern. If contemporary art can be considered a critical practice, then its aim might be, as Aldiss defined SF, a search for a definition of man and his status in the universe, which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge – that is, in our present age.

Fig 1.2 Superflex. Flooded McDonalds, 2008. RED video installation. 20 mins, looped. Collection: Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Examples of the way contemporary art engages with science fictional themes can be found in two notable video works, SUPERFLEX’s Flooded McDonalds [2009] [Fig 1.2] and Aernout Mik’s Pulverous [2003] [Figs 1.3]. In the single-screen Flooded McDonalds the eponymous fast food outlet is slowly filled with water, at first creeping under doorways, then water slowly filling the room, plastic trays, wrappers and packaging – and a statue of the corporate mascot – all slowly rise to the ceiling. The cause of the flood is not explained; it is literally an outside force that comes to bear on the interior of a corporate bubble. The audience watches entranced as the waters rise, and then as the fixed camera’s point of view is inundated. Aernout Mik’s Pulverous, a three-screen video installation, depicts the interior of a supermarket being torn apart by a seemingly bland collection of middle class men and women;

41 they claw at packaged foods with the determined single-mindedness of the undead, while others slowly demolish parts of the supermarket, collapsing walls and shelves.

Fig 1.3 Aernout Mik, Pulverous, 2003. Three-channel video installation, 23:27, looped. Collection: Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland.

Neither of the videos offer an explanation for their on-screen action but their narratives produce a profound sense of estrangement. The action of Pulverous suggests a narrative of zombies and apocalypse — and indeed an almost identical sequence appears in the film Blindness [Meirelles, 2008] in a scene where the citizens of an unnamed city, stricken by a blindness-inducing disease, stumble through an abandoned supermarket grabbing at boxes and packets. SUPERFLEX’s Flooded McDonalds recalls the eerie underwater cities featured in such films as Waterworld [Reynolds, 1995] and AI: Artificial Intelligence [Spielberg, 2001], or in the music clip for Radiohead’s Pyramid Song [Shynola, 2001] – an odd, mesmerising fantasy.

42 A photographic image such as Mitra Tabrizian’s City, London [2008] [Fig 1.4] is also imbued with a science fictional aesthetic. A group of men mill about in aimless contemplation in an office atrium, an ambiguous narrative suspended in time. As Kobena Mercer points out

in the corporate minimalism of their architectural surroundings, the men’s dark suits draw attention to similarities of gender and age. Variations of race and ethnicity are apparent as white faces are in the minority, but sameness makes an odd return in the look-alike indeterminacy of the majority [Mercer, 2011: 199].

Like the film Gattaca [Niccols, 1997] - with its narrative of genetic manipulation and corporate dominated culture, and a highly stylised art direction of office atria and elegantly suited men and women - individual identity in both film and photograph is besieged by the technological-real, a sense of estrangement compounded by the familiar nature of the image.

Fig 1.4 Mitra Tabrizian, City, London, 2008. Type C photograph, 122x250 cm. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

43 Both science fiction and contemporary art seek to depict moments that have not actually occurred, acute moments of sublimated contemporaneity that appear like apparitions of the future, balanced between the literal and the metaphorical. But while numerous contemporary artists have produced work that connects to science fiction on broad aesthetic or thematic levels, few have attempted to deal with SF on a sustained conceptual or theoretical basis. In 2002 Kodwo Eshun, formerly of the CCRU, joined with Anjalika Sagar to form The Otolith Group, a collaborative art project that “is formally engaged with research led projects exploring legacies and potentialities of artists led proposals around the document and essay film, the archive, the aural and sonic medium, speculative futures and science fiction” [Otolith Group, 2012].

Fig 1.5 Otolith Group, Anathema, 2011. Digital video.

The Otolith Group have explored science fiction narratives, either as the central theme of individual works, or as scaffolding to theoretical concepts. Their exhibition Westfailure [2012] consisted of several related individual works that included text, photographs, vinyl album covers, sound, video and performance. The work Anathema [2011] [Fig 1.5], a video which extracted “the seductive marrow of high resolution right out of advertising and other digital bodies, and, in doing so, converts irresistible images into spectral abstractions” [Dang, 2012] was exhibited alongside Daughter Products [2011], a suite of archival images in which the viewer witnessed “socialist camaraderie as delegations visit factories, schools, museums, etc” and in which “images act as delegates from the past: they disperse doubt in favor of

44 previous political uncertainties and provide us with the hope of disturbing the temporal autonomy of the markets, myths and more” [Dang, 2012]. The exhibition sought to revisit “episodes from the archives of the twentieth century in order to intervene into narratives that aim to capture futurity for market fundamentalism” [NA, Westfailure, 2012]. Focusing on a 1999 text by British economist Susan Strange that argued that the Treaty Of Westphalia of 1648, a founding agreement that helped create modern Europe, had failed modern capitalism, undermining its security, economic growth and mutual cooperation. The Otolith Group saw Strange’s text as a communiqué with the present moment, a post-global financial crisis world where system failure is a commonplace concept. The Otolith Group’s works are typically fragmented and discursive, based or inspired by texts, and purposefully incomplete. As art critic Nina Power put it: “The past is littered with the debris [of failed] futures, while our present incorporates memory of hopes that have long been abandoned … The Otolith Group doggedly investigates these temporal slips and Utopian dreams of ‘the temporality of past potential futurity” [Power, 2010; 90].

Where the Otolith Group’s work is diverse in form and eclectic in its engagement with SF, the work of Anne Lislegaard is formally more conservative yet no less engaged. Lislegaard has explored science fiction narratives in her video installation pieces, extending and making abstract narratives derived from SF texts. Crystal World (After J.G. Ballard) [2006] [Fig 1.6] is typical of her approach. Two side-by-side screens present a dual projection – on both screens a computer generated, black and white animation of the interior of a room plays out, broadly schematized but suggestive and eerie, eventually switching to the left screen, the right hand image giving way to text taken from the Ballard story of the title. Like her single-screen work Bellona (After Samuel Delaney) [2005] and Left Hand of Darkness (after Ursula K Le Guin) [2008] – which form a trilogy — Lislegaard’s videos extend the room space of the gallery by matching precisely the scale of the CGI room to the gallery’s architecture and, although the images have a very basic computer ‘look’, they are disturbingly effective.

In both the work of the Otolith Group and Lislegaard, the viewer is required to entertain a state of estrangement. The Otolith Group’s collagist approach to narrative requires an active engagement with the content that will allow the audience-viewer to decode their intentions, and counter-intuitively accept that, as in a science fiction story, the past can communicate with the future, or conversely, what is done in the

45 present can change the past. The metaphor of memory, like the time travel machine, is embodied in the novum of the exhibition. Lislegaard’s work is more easily decoded as SF, with its moody soundtracks and audio mixes, yet its poetic engagement with text shares something of the Otolith Group’s discursivity, the novum found in the projection but also the gallery space.

As we can see from the examples discussed here, in the video works and photographs that engage indirectly with SF yet resonate with its aesthetic, and artworks that are fundamentally science fictional in both intent and concept, demonstrate the very real, active and ongoing negotiation between SF and cultural forms that sit well beyond generic borders of SF literature and film.

Methodology & Proposal

To say something is ‘science fictional’ is to suggest that the thing has the form or character of science fiction. The term is used widely with this meaning in mind but, as we have seen from our preceding examination of the genre of science fiction, there is no commonly agreed-upon definition, no limit or function nor even a single process that could definitively describe SF. Theorists such as Suvin, Baudrillard and Csicsery-Ronay Jr. create a sense of its place within wider culture, and the dynamic of its internal workings, but as we have seen from the preceding discussion of contemporary art, concepts such as the novum and cognitive estrangement are applicable to cultural objects such as pop videos and academic theory. If there is no centre to SF, then the periphery begins to look as viable as the centre, and indeed, can be considered as the dynamic engine of the cultural interchange between familiar generic form and the alter-generic. In this context, the science fictional is an immanent possibility, a space ripe for speculation and exploration, overabundant with possibility and unrestrained by definition. Despite this, the transaction between science fiction, the science fictional and various cultural forms, is a radically under- theorised area.

This thesis takes three forms.

46 The first is the study you now hold in your hands. It is a work of speculative non- fiction. Taking its cue, if not style, from the writings of David Toop and Kodwo Eshun, this component of the thesis is an open-ended, deep-culture exploration mission to map and consider the connections and resonances of the science fictional, from the centre of the genre to its outermost reaches, exploring the echoes and traces of genre SF in a variety of cultural forms, from music, sound design and architecture, to contemporary art, car advertising and children’s television. The exploration is driven by three questions: What is the nature of the science fictional? How does it operate? And how can its operation be utilised in an artwork? While the medium of culture is considered as a four-dimensional space that can be charted, described and recorded, reverberation, density and resonance are used as metaphors to describe how cultural artifacts appear within this cultural medium, describing their context and historical connections, and status within cultural theory.

The second part of the thesis is the video installation Science Fictional. Produced in conjunction with the textual study, the work expands SF narrative from the single- screen cinema experience into a five-screen installation work that liberates the viewer from the descriptive constraints of linear narrative into an abstract media space. Using fragments of images from a range of SF films, scientific videos, online sources and original material, the work is a collage that coalesces into a science- fictional narrative, yet, when viewed individually, the video sequences are richly suggestive of SF tropes.

The third part of the thesis is a collection of complimentary research resources that have been collected during the course of study. These resources have been posted together on the blog Science Fictional [www.sciencefictional.net]. The resources range from academic and popular texts, images and videos related to, or suggestive of science fiction, to links to the web sites of artists and others discussed in the thesis.

The rationale for the three forms of this study is that the fragmentary nature of the science fictional is embodied in this approach, spreading out across space and time, a reflexive model of its own making, each layer reflective of the other, offering the reader and viewer a deep engagement with the study.

47 This study seeks to explore the connective lines between mediums and media coupled with research that conflates aspects of critical theory, art history and cultural studies into a unique discourse. Through an account of the nature of the science fictional, this thesis argues that science fiction as we understand it, and how it has been conventionally conceived, is in fact the counter of its apparent function within culture. While terms such as “genre” and “mainstream” suggest a binary of centre and periphery, this thesis demonstrates that the quasi-generic is in fact the dominant partner in the process of cultural production. The studio work, writing and online components act in concert, complimenting the hybridity of science fiction and contemporary culture.

48 Reverberation

49 “What’s Wrong?”

Science Fictional Sound Space & Cultural Reverb

A Very Unusual Reality

In 2004 Warner Home Video released a two-disc DVD ‘Director’s Cut’ of George Lucas’s debut feature THX 1138. When it had been originally released in 1971 as a part of a production deal brokered by producer Francis Ford Coppola’s fledgling American Zoetrope studio and Warner Bros., the film was a financial disappointment [Stone, 1999: 3]. Despite arresting visuals, a hypnotic soundtrack and inventive production design, the film was considered too depressing and bleak by both critics and mass audiences alike. Its budget was just $750,000 USD but it failed to make a substantial enough profit earning just $2.5 million at the box office [N.A. IFC]. Yet THX 1138 retained a devoted cult following among SF fans and cinema buffs. It was a staple of late night TV schedules and midnight cinema screenings throughout the 1970s and ‘80s until it was eventually released on VHS tape in 1991 [Pye, Miles, 1999: 69]. By the time it belatedly appeared on DVD in the first decade of the 21st century its arrival was eagerly anticipated.

Lucas was well known for his tinkering, altering and revising of his past films. He had made numerous changes to his late ‘70s Star Wars trilogy during their periodic re- releases and the ‘director’s cut’ of THX 1138 also featured extensive changes, from image and colour restorations standard for re-released analogue films transferred to digital media, to more complex cut-and-pasting of old shots into “extended” special effects scenes, to the complete removal of some sequences and the insertion of entirely new scenes and visual effects [Maverick Media.com]. While some purists were disappointed that Lucas had so comprehensively “revised” the film it was certainly in keeping with the ‘futuristic’ ethos of its making.

The visual ‘look’ of the un-restored THX 1138 remains a landmark in science fiction filmmaking, echoing the minimalist decor of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space

50 Odyssey [1968], but with a distinctive style and approach of its own. During pre- production Lucas, along with co-writer and sound designer Walter Murch, made a presentation to executives at Warner Bros. to explain their film and its visual style – it wouldn’t just be about the future, it literally would be the future. Lucas and Murch proposed to shoot the film in a revolutionary new system:

[We said] that we were going to develop this very unusual reality using ‘rotary-cam’ photography. […] Fortunately, nobody at the studio asked what it was – because it was nothing. There was no such thing as rotary-cam photography. We thought it would make them believe that we could create this whole world with some wonderful new technique [Shay, 1996: 58].

The film is an updating of the dystopian city SF narrative typified by such classics as Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s1984. In Lucas’s film the main character THX is liberated from his drone-like existence in an underground city when his roommate LUH substitutes his daily drug dose with a placebo. The film’s narrative and specific elements of its visual style are discussed in Part 4, but a consideration of its overarching approach to achieving its distinctive look and feel, and its sense of futurism, is instructive in understanding why it remains a landmark of SF filmmaking, not just in the way it looks, but also in the way it sounds.

For Lucas, his approach to the film’s production was much simpler than an imaginary technology — the film was shot in Technoscope wide screen in a highly stylised manner with flat lighting, shallow depth of field and enhanced film grain. For Lucas, THX 1138 was “an environmental film” [Kline, 1999: 13] that captured the brilliance of modern architectural space, the director recalling that, “we were shooting mostly modern interiors, which usually have ten times more light than they really need … an architectural phenomenon of the sixties and seventies” [Kline, 1999: 12].

With only two sets built for the film, THX 1138 is an estranged vision of the real world, albeit a radically altered one. As a profile from American Cinematographer noted in 1971, the film production “travelled to no less than 22 locations in the San Francisco Bay area, filming in such places as the Oakland Coliseum, the San Francisco Pacific Gas and Electric Building, the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael and the various tunnels and tubes of the A-building Bay Area Rapid Transit System” [Kline, 1999: 8].

51 The film imagined the future as a space of brilliant whiteness, of impersonal public atria and governed by an inscrutable internal logic that suggested a heavily mediatised and depersonalised world. As J.P. Telotte noted THX 1138 offered “a stark simplicity: cubicles and bare walls that frame the individual within severe rectangles, imprisoning the subject but also replicating the film frame itself” and that “in a further development of this design scheme […] it emphasizes horizonless, open space that has the effect of reducing dimension, turning the self into a two- dimensional figure” [Telotte, 2001: 130]. A number of other critics noted the film’s unusual degree of reflexivity. Garrett Stewart, writing of scenes where THX escapes from a prison - a “white limbo” without walls or guards – singles out a moment where even the viewer is acknowledged.

In escaping from the actual detention center … [THX] is led out by a fugitive hologram, no less. This video refugee, one of the figures nightly used to pacify the masses, is a mirage tired of being ensnared in his monotonous digital circuit and aching to break free into bodied reality. When asked by the hero for the direction out, he points straight off the screen into the camera and so at us, at a palpable world elsewhere, the world itself [Stewart, 1985: 176].

The alterations made to the film upon its re-release in 2004 gave it a curious ‘out of time’ feel. While sections of the film retained its distinctive original look, other sections, particularly scenes where CGI creatures and technology had been inserted, were, as fansite Maverick Media noted, “badly rendered (obvious CGI animation) and so are out of place with the rest of the film” [Maverickmedia.com]. In effect, THX 1138 was no longer a film of its time, a film not of the past, the present nor the future, but sitting somewhere uncomfortably in-between.

Broadcasting to the Universe

The visuals of THX 1138 are only half the story of its uncanny ability [to produce its considerable sense of estrangement. Its soundtrack is a mixture of two elements; an evocative sound montage designed by Walter Murch, and a score by Lalo Schifrin. Voices, fragments of source music, public address announcements, electronic chatter between unseen torturers, the chimes of elevators, the whirring internal

52 mechanisms of police-robots, TV news readers, the sound of toilets flushing and medicine cabinet doors opening, and many more sounds, are mixed and blended, often jarringly, combining both diegetic and non-diegetic sources, into an ambient sound field. William Whittington notes the soundtrack’s strong suggestion of desensitization and how music and sound design, and their inventive techniques, were combined:

In a cutaway, a chrome police officer holds the hand of a child as they wait for an elevator. The music accompanying the scene is canned and hollow, akin to something shoppers might hear in a mall. To achieve this effect, Murch played “dry” recordings of the music in the empty hallway then re-recorded it to merge its echoes and spatial cues, using his technique of “worldizing.” The result is the audio equivalent of fluorescent lighting, dulling humanity and emotion in this controlled subterranean environment [Whittington, 2007: 78].

Whittington mentions Murch’s technique of “worldizing”: the re-recording of effects, dialogue and other elements by placing a speaker in an audio environment such as a large hall or auditorium, then re-recording the playback. One scene suggests the auditory methodology of the film as a whole.

Murch charaterised the ambience recordings for the ‘White Limbo’ sequences in this way: ‘It’s basically the room tone from the Exploratorium in San Francisco. …It’s a veil of mysterious sound – it doesn’t have anything specific to it, but it is full of suggestive fragments.’ This description could easily be used to categorize the entire sound track of the film. The sound montages are full of ‘suggestive fragments’ that offer subtle cinematic metaphors, sharp social criticism, and even satire [Whittington, 2007: 75].

Other effects, particularly those on the off-screen dialogue, were achieved in an even more extraordinary way: broadcasting the recorded dialogue on HAM Radio and re- recording the transmission: “We recorded all the voices and [then] broadcast the tape out into the universe and picked it up on another receiver, a sideband receiver, then I would twiddle the dial to get all those phasing effects” [Tompkins, 2012]. The film’s sound design is widely acknowledged as innovative and a ground-breaking achievement that anticipated the sound design Murch would later create for Coppola’s The Conversation [1974] and Apocalypse, Now [1979]. Murch, as co-

53 writer, conceived of both film story and soundtrack as a means to produce a profound sense of alienation, explaining that the film was to feel as if it had come from the future.

When we looked at science fiction films that had been made up to that time, they were all films about the future. …We wanted to make a film from the future … There are just mysterious things in [the film] that you don’t know because you’re not a part of that culture. But that adds to the overall flavor. Everything is not digested for your consumption. THX is full of those kind of things […] that presumably meant something to the people in the future, but we don’t know what to quite make of it [Tompkins, 2012].

What’s Wrong?

The sound design of THX 1138 is a richly suggestive audio world. Its sound design relies on contrasts between clean and distorted sounds, natural sounds and electronic noises, live and recorded audio. In an early sequence in the film, moments of daily life in the underground city are revealed: “What’s wrong?” asks a calm male voice. “I need something stronger” a drugged voice responds before being cut off by an immediate reply, perhaps a different voice, and in a tone impossibly upbeat and reassuring: “Take four red capsules. In ten minutes take two more. Help is on the way!” Cut. A woman’s voice is heard to ask: “What’s wrong?” A distorted voice, as if heard over an intercom, states: “I want you to take a visual record of this. We found it in the patching cell. We killed it.” Another woman’s voice answers: “Thank you for being conscientious. A visual record is being taken and filed with the Department of Biological flow” The voice is cut off, lost in a melange of ring-modulated sounds, beeps and indistinct electronic noises contrasted with a clearly audible male voice intoning detailed legalise. Another sudden cut and the listener is dropped into a deep sound space, a communal atria deep in the underground metropolis, a single repeating phrase of easy listening music played by an alto sax lilting in cold reverb, a woman’s voice announcing: “Today only, dendrites are forty seven pennies – buy now!” The key dynamic of the soundtrack, and the heart of its science fiction aesthetic, is the use of reverb.

54 Reverb

Reverberation is the persistence of a sound. Unlike echo, which is the repetition of a sound in its entirety, reverberant sound overlaps. It ranges from a very short reverberant ‘slap’ when a reflective surface such as a wall is very close to the listener, to longer and less definitive audio “atmospheres” created when a reflective surface is more distant, such as the audio field of a large hall, church or cathedral. As sound theorist Peter Doyle explains, reverberation “occurs when sound is reflected either so many times that no single, discontinuous repeat of the source sound is heard, or when the reflective surfaces are too near the listener to allow subjective aural separation (as in, say, a tiled bathroom)” [Doyle, 2005: 38].

Murch’s ‘worldizing’ was a means of creating reverberant atmospheres using the natural acoustics of physical space. However, the technology to artificially create reverb of varying degrees of intensity has been available for decades. Early analogue devices using ‘springs’ and magnetic tape were common from the 1950s onwards until relatively inexpensive analogue electronic, and then digital reverb units, became widely available in the 1970s and ‘80s. This technology too was largely superseded as reverb effects could be achieved using software available as outboard effects in multi-track audio products such as Pro Tools and Acid Pro. The effect of reverb is considered a crucial component to achieving a “satisfying” auditory experience: reverberation separates sounds, places it in a “space”, and creates a sense of a relationship to a single sound — or an entire audio world.

Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue argue that reverberation is an essential component of social relations, not just as a means of locating one’s position within an audio field – say as one walks a city street and determines the location of objects, people and actions in relation to the listener’s position – but as a culturally encoded experience [Augoyard, Torgue, 2005]. They claim that the experience of reverberant space suggests a “feeling of ‘collectivity’ and the sharing of social communication” [Augoyard, Torgue, 2005; 111] and that reverb has a range of associations.

Reverberation is socially perceived as an indication of solemnity and monumentality. It signifies volume and large size. This monumentality can be sensed as functional and inherent to the use of some locations (cathedrals, concert halls) or as unpleasant and residual for others (train station halls,

55 concrete underground parking garages). … Through its architectural representation, reverberation is easily associated with various functions of power (religion, justice) [Augoyard, Torgue, 2005; 116].

Augoyard and Torgue further note reverberation as a signifier of otherworldliness: “Reverberation is abundantly used in media expressions: horror and science-fiction films, westerns, and advertisements emphasize the connection of reverberation to large spaces, even if the location is often not adapted to such an effect (desert, interplanetary space)” [Augoyard, Torgue 2005; 117].

This auditory signification was established almost from the outset of modern media. Philip Hayward notes the use of ‘off world’ sound effects in early cinematic SF in the 1920s while early electronic instruments such as the theremin and the sonovox were used to add non-traditional elements to largely traditional, symphonic scores [Hayward, 2004]. The theremin became a staple of SF cinema in the post World War 2 period, and was used on the soundtracks of such films as The Day The Earth Stood Still [Wise, 1951], The Thing From Another World [Nyby, 1951] and Forbidden Planet [Wilcox, 1956]. This latter film, with a soundtrack composed by Bebe and Louis Barron using the theremin and other electronic devices and tape manipulation, is widely acknowledged as one of, if not the earliest example of a completely synthetic score. Writes Hayward, “The Barron’s score explored the limits of available sound making technologies and created a highly distinctive audio track which attempted to express thematic aspects of the narrative by developing new sonic signifiers for mood, drama and effect” [Hayward, 2004; 10-11].

The use of reverb was a common approach to creating a sense of spatial relationships within a musical performance [akin to the listening experience of hearing instruments discreetly within a live setting], and to produce resonance for electronic instruments and other devices that lacked “natural” reverberant qualities of their own. As Augoyard and Torgue argue, reverberation became intimately connected to SF’s audio aesthetic. Films such as Ed Wood [Burton, 1994] and Mars Attacks! [Burton, 1996] playfully restate this connection as a marker of their retro- kitsch ‘50s aesthetics. Indeed, the association is now so common as to be almost commonplace, and one may find its use in songs such as Sci-Fidelity [2010] by Free The Robots, throughout the retro-flavoured faux-production music album Reverse Engineering by The Simonsound [2011], in the introductory music to the Ken Hollings

56 podcast series Welcome to Mars [2006] or even in the “Sci-Fi” ringtone that comes as a standard option on the iPhone.

The Utopian Elsewhere

Fantasy and SF cinema has long been a site of technological innovation as it deploys the novel, exotic and unfamiliar in both vision and sound in ever more spectacular configurations. As the use of reverb and electronics demonstrates, this deployment can be particularly effective – and influential. Early adopters of electronic instrumentation in popular musical composition invariably tended toward novelty songs and exotica and noted composer/arranger Les Baxter is acknowledged as significant figure in this development [Hayward, 2004. Zuberi, 2004. Toop, 1999, et al]. Baxter’s Music out of The Moon [1947] featuring the theremin with background reverb effects is considered a key album in the evolution of mid-century exotica. Later albums by other exotica performer/composers would further conflate fantasy orientalism with outer space: Esquivel’s Other World’s Other Sounds [1958] and Russ Garcia’s Fantastica: Music from Outer Space [1958] sat alongside Baxter’s own later Space Escapades [1958] among many other examples of “outer space exotica” in the record collection of the average space age bachelor.

Nabeel Zuberi traces the connections and cross-cultural influences between 1950s exotica, film soundtracks and the evolution of free jazz in what he called a collective yearning for “a utopian elsewhere” [Zuberi, 2004; 83]. Whereas exotica artists drew on the faux worlds of Hollywood orchestration, the radical avant grade jazz that developed from the late 1950s was united by an ideology of ‘outness’ – a sense of futurism, alienation from mainstream culture, and a will to experimentation – a combination that would utilise every “sonic variable to create interest for the listener” while demanding of the audience their full attention “and [an] appreciation of sound for its own sake” [Zuberi, 2004; 83]. David Toop charts the startling similarities of approach, composition and effect in the music of Baxter and Sun Ra, finding “a similar blend of exoticas; either echo-saturated Asian percussion meditations or Afro- Latin rhythms, mysterious flute melodies and glistening keyboard ostinatos” [Toop, 1999: 40]. The ethos of both exotica and free jazz experimentation was an attitude to sound: “Sound, particularly electronically generated or mutated sound, … a highly

57 evocative medium to depicting vivid unknown worlds, utopias implied by America’s post-war Tupperware futurism” [Toop, 1999: 41].

Into this already heady cultural brew we find the addition of the influence of the electro acoustic/concrete avant-garde. Paris-based Musique Concrete composers utilising tape, microphone and turntable technology for experimental and avant garde composition working in the late 1940s and early 1950s such as Pierre Schaffer and Pierre Henry, Cologne-based composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Edgar Varèse, and New Yorker Milton Babbitt, were particularly influential in the mix of music, sound effects and non-traditional instrumentation found on the soundtracks of mid-century science fiction cinema. As Rebecca Leydon put it,

At a time when electro-acoustic music and musique concrète were the esoterica of ivory tower pursuits, Forbidden Planet disseminated a new sound palette to a popular audience. [The film] thus played an important role in anchoring the signifying relationship between a new category of musical sounds and their narrative connotations [Leydon, 2004: 61].

Innervol Overdose

The soundtrack of THX 1138 is a compacted audio history of the science fictional sound field. Although a theremin is absent from the mix, examples of avant-garde and experimental sound collaging, afrodelic jazz, proto-sampling and vintage exoticas, all bathed in degrees of reverb, can be found deep within its audio DNA. The fragments of easy listening music that Whittington called the aural equivalent of ‘fluorescent lighting’ invoke the homogenised orientalist sensibilities of Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny, while a fragment of ‘African’ drumming – heard as THX watches erotic dancing on his home holo-screen – suggests the meeting of Sun Ra and Les Baxter. There are quotations of avant-garde minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley [Tompkins, 2012: 16] while a straight lift from a work by Pierre Henry – an audio ‘squeak’ – almost resulted in a copyright infringement case by Henry against the film’s producers. [Tompkins, 2012: 18]. Schifrin’s orchestral score ‘re-composed’ classical ‘temp music’ that had been used by Murch, elements of 18th century Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater that Murch had pitched four

58 octaves below its original and then reversed. This music was then transcribed by Schifrin for ‘forwards play’ by an orchestra [Tompkins, 2012: 16]. While many of the film’s ‘technological’ sounds are now dated [such as the chatter of the dot matrix printer] the soundtrack is also a remarkably prescient example of a sensibility of science fictional sound that exists in the wide terrain of contemporary electronic music.

Dream Fluid

New audio technologies and styles of music inevitably restate the connection between a sense of contemporaneity and a notional future just as surely as the combination of theremin and reverb did more than half a century ago. From the hyper accelerated beat sampling of Jungle and Drum and Bass of the 1990s, to the mix/match aesthetic of turntablism of the last decade, to the drones of deep-sampled audio fragments of contemporary ambient music, to the as-yet-unnamed sub genres of IDM, the texture of SF’s audio field is continually reinvented from its basic materials: electronics and reverb. While the soundtracks of most science fiction films remain highly conservative — employing symphonic scores with diegetic effects — electronic music deploys multiple approaches in establishing its sense of futurity, from pure electronic sounds and sampling to field recordings, acoustic instruments to a vast array of computer-based sound manipulations. When Empty Mall from David Toop’s album 37th Floor At Sunset: Music for Mondophrenetic™ [2000] uses fragments of Muzak the science fictional audio space of THX 1138 spooks the listener’s mind. Empty Mall’s reverberant space is contrasted with the dry and forbidding electronic blips and drones, sweeps and glitches of the next track, Automatic Security Procedures. Deep within the mix are fragments of reverbed voices, environmental effects and a lone ‘musical’ phrase of descending vibes. The effect is unsettling, an aesthetic of estrangement all the more disturbing for its lack of an explanatory novum; the suggestion of the sound field of 37th Floor At Sunset is that this is the world as it is – not of the future, but of now. Toop, a music theorist and writer as well as a musician, is acutely aware of the aesthetics of science fictional sound and examples of it can be found through many of his recorded works.

59 Toop’s interest in science fictional exotica has led to albums and texts that together offer a wide-screen study of exotica’s trans-historical and pan-cultural attractions, as well as its significant cultural repulsions. Toop’s albums Screen Ceremonies [1995], Pink Noir [1996], Spirit World [1997] and Hot Pants Idol [1999] explore the confluence of collaborative composition and multi-instrumental performances, each imbued with a SF aesthetic; the track Almost Transparent Blue from Pink Noir features an undulating arrhythmic backing of cymbals, drums and gongs beneath a fluttering ‘fuzz flute’ while Butoh-Porno from Screen Ceremonies is a tentative series of beats, a dense layering of skittering background electronics and dry, electronic ‘insect’ noises. Ceremony Viewed Through Iron Slit from Spirit World adds to this rich audio field a stream-of-consciousness narration. The sense of place and time in Toop’s music feels highly fictionalised – as if each of these albums comes from a common sound future, a sense heightened by the pan-cultural nature of their instrumentation, and the jazz-inflected playing.

In Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes In A Real World, Toop offers the reader various scenarios describing the contextual nature of sound perception, revealing the social signification of exotic sound within movie soundtracks and easy listening albums, free jazz and improvised music. These scenarios include a [possibly fictional] encounter with a mysterious student at an academic conference, a dialogue with the movie dog Lassie, and a science fiction narrative set on the planet Mercury. In Pink Fluffy Cubicle on Mercurius Port the narrator is aboard the starship Lord Jim when sensors pick up the “static-spiked wisps of Muzak songs”. The narrator is both fascinated and horrified since: “Muzak had been banned on Earth-One for more than two hundred years, yet the sound (or our fantasised speculations) lived on in collective memory, scuttling in the shadows of the digital archives” [Toop, 1999: 234]. The reception of these banned sounds sets off a strange combination of yearning and repulsion.

Old timers who such as myself had been tempered in the noise vats of our homeland planet, yet we shared the fascination of our juvenile crew members, fascinations with that mysterious place where human desires shatter and reformulate as they enter the consciousness of machines and retrieval systems… We had entertained no thoughts of berthing on this exotic and dangerous planet. Mournful and repetitious, a signal from deep space had transmitted cries that refused to be ignored [Toop, 1999: 234].

60 Drawn to the fleshpots of the Mercurius Port’s Tru-Life clubs — and the promise of “dream fluid” — the narrator enters Crooning On Venus, a place catering for the illicit alteration of mood, a panoply of sensations including “melancholy, loss, romance, lust, violence, tranquillity, disturbance, surrealism, hallucination and nightmare” [Toop, 1999: 235].

Toop’s playful text suggests the lure of various kinds of science fictional exotica and its presence within the wider corpus of sonic SF, but it also suggests that it is a collective memory that socially transmits an idea of sound. What Toop calls a “signal from deep space” is a metaphor for a recollection of music, its sometimes-guilty pleasures, its temporal locations within our lives, and the array of memories that sound can provoke. And certain of these sound memories have science fictional significations.

The ambiguity of this signification, and the slippery definition of sound as a socially constructed communication, exists in direct correlation with how we cognitively experience sound and music – an ephemeral moment that is as weightless as memory itself. We listen to a song and then it is gone. Where images seem to possess a discreet mimesis, sound has little reference to anything much beyond itself. Despite the apparent lack of a mimetic context, sound/music reinforces the social context of its reception and understanding because, with rare exception, that is in fact its mimetic property: the context of listening. This is what is we might term “cultural reverb” – the transmission and reception of ideas encoded into cultural artefacts such as the lyrics of songs, in film soundtracks, in the repeated reversioning of old movies into new versions — and within the field of “sensors” such radio, television and the web. But for something to be ‘transmitted’, data requires a medium through which it can travel.

Imaginary Universes

The use of reverb creates a sense of space and, as we have seen from its close association with a science fictional aesthetic, it is an imaginative audio world. Its deployment can be both literal, in the sense that artificially created reverb can simulate an audio environment akin to a space that the listener may have

61 experienced [say a hall, church or parking garage], or metaphorical in nature, which is to say reverb can be utterly artificial, with no reference point in the real world. Combined with electronics, this reverberating sound field is an imaginary universe ripe for speculation, exploration and discovery.

Typically, science fiction cinema tends to use sound effects and music to enhance a sense of estrangement – as we have seen in the example of THX 1138 – or offer a degree of emotional realism to a fantastic setting. Yet other types of music and sound suggest much more radical sound worlds that those found on film soundtracks. Let us briefly consider three examples of contemporary electronic music and trace their connection to our history of sonic SF, study their individual sound worlds, and their connections to generic SF.

Signal / Distortion / Interference

Holger Czukay’s 1993 album Moving Pictures is a sequence of tracks that is broadly classified as ‘ambient’ in online libraries. Czukay’s album is however more in keeping with the visionary sonic universe of a science fictional aesthetic than the listless accompaniment to a massage or float tank session. Underlying drones are layered over with small incidents of fragmentary melody, vocals, spoken word interludes, snippets of speech and occasional French horn bubble up and fade away. Throughout the album’s six tracks, recurring samples of short wave radio are heard, giving Moving Pictures the flavour of a collage, albeit an [intermittently] tuneful one. The track Radio in An Hourglass is in its quietist stretch a sound world built from undulating, looped samples of radio interference on the short wave band. Although the talismanic phrase “cyber space” is heard repeatedly on the track Floatspace [to a certain degree of listener embarrassment] the album’s science fictional flavour is most vividly alive in the luxurious tonalities of Radio in An Hourglass, in which samples of Turkish music float over the crackle and hum of radio static. Czukay’s track captures the sense of vastness found within the medium band frequencies of a ‘squashed’ radio signal – an intense audio field with its own acute spatial associations.

Czukay’s music, from the time he was a student in the early 1960s, through his period with Krautrock band Can [1986-1979], and then through various solo and collaborative albums from the 1980s onwards, had featured experimentation with the

62 use of ‘found’ voices and music recorded from short wave radio. These works ranged from the languorous improvisational guitar of Ode to Perfume from On The Way To The Peak of Normal, [1981], the ersatz pop of Blessed Easter from the album Rome Remains Rome [1987] to live performances of radio tuning, collected on the album Radio Wave Surfer [1991].

Czukay had studied classical music in Duisberg in the late 1950s and, along with fellow Can band member Irmin Schmidt, was a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen in the early 1960s. The composer’s attitudes to technology and music were highly influential, as was his use of radios as ready-made electronic musical instruments. Recalled Czukay.

Over the years, I have often used radios to create music and this is something I learned from Stockhausen, after I attended the first performance of his piece called Kurzwellen (Short-waves) in Bremen in 1968, for which he used short-wave radios as unpredictable synthesisers. The six musicians on stage were using radios as instruments, with Stockhausen sitting in the middle of the group mixing the audio like a DJ and making something out of it. What was important was not finding the right station; it was the fact of searching [Czukay, 2009: 46].

Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen also included piano, percussion and viola along with electronic filtering and an electronium. Where Czukay’s Radio in An Hourglass is obviously in debt to the process of Stockhausen’s music, as listening experiences they are very different; Czukay’s track is smooth and sonorous while Stockhausen’s is textured and detailed, with sudden rises and falls in volume and density occurring seemingly at random. As Czukay points out, there was a degree of improvisation within Stockhausen’s piece, as Kurzwellen would change depending on the stations received during a performance. The connection between the works, however, is for the listener the inclusion of the sound world of radio signals, and the distortion and interference that occurs as the radio is tuned.

Science fictional audio space has evolved since the 1950s. What was once standard for sound design is now consigned to the past — the use of a theremin would be simply too kitsch to be taken seriously — but the use of radio static or other distortions in sound remain evocative. In Sunshine [Boyle, 2007], the crew of Icarus

63 II, a massive spaceship on a journey to the Sun, encounter the drifting hulk of Icarus I. Thought lost, the ship is now in orbit around Mercury, a forbidding silhouette in space. The only sign that the ship is still active – and that someone is possibly still alive inside – is the transmission of a distress signal: a repeating digital sequence made mournful by a deep reverb and a crackling, echoing repeat. A sense of profound isolation is reinforced by images of Mercury’s cratered planetary surface far below.

In Robert Zemeckis’s Contact [1997] a signal from Vega is beamed towards Earth. In a wide shot of Earth’s entire northern hemisphere the voice of a preacher can be heard, a single voice in a space of deep reverberation. “We shop from home, we surf the web, yet we feel emptier, lonelier and more cut off from each other than at any other time in human history – we’re a synthesised society in a great big hurry to get to the …” The preacher never finishes his thought because radio astronomer Eleanor Arroway and her team at a radio telescope array in the deserts of the American South West hear the signal: through low band crackle we hear first contact with another civilisation. It’s not a voice or a welcoming – but a harsh, repeating noise, a cycle that is revealed to follow the sequence of prime numbers from 2 to 101.

In John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness [1987] a team of physics students and academics are studying a mysterious container of green liquid that has been found in the basement of an American church. As the team investigate the strange properties of the liquid – and murder and mayhem occur – each team member is visited by a strange dream. The image cuts from the fine grain of film stock to a dream state of noisy pixelated video as an ominous voice is heard through walls of static: “This is not a dream... not a dream. We are using your brain's electrical system as a receiver. We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the year one, nine, nine.”

In Sunshine a diegetic sound effect has the quality of an electronic score, while in Contact the signal, although not musical in nature, fits precisely within an otherwise traditional symphonic score. In Prince of Darkness the listener is also the aerial, the sound of static and distortion occurring within the subconscious. The dynamic of space is simultaneously conflated and expanded, a sense of closeness and distance confused between something intimate – our minds – and something vast: interstellar space.

64 Robert Henke’s music captures something of this spatial dynamic. Working with a variety of compositional techniques his music makes reference to physical space but is simulated. “My music is more about spaces and states than about linear development,’ states Henke, and his albums Signal to Noise [2004] and Layering Buddha [2006] utilise varying degrees of reverberation to achieve their evocative effects [Henke, Install]. Both albums are abstract dronescapes with shifting aural densities and detail mixed with moments of static and granulation. But they are also, in the listener’s mind, akin to landscapes as the ear attempts to order the sounds into something analogous to the natural world. Studies for Thunder from Signal to Noise is the most explicit reference to a landscape, and the slow build and eventual crescendo of noise suggests the dynamic of a natural thunderstorm. Layering Buddha makes no specific connection to an environment but it too tempts the listener into actively imagining shapes in the noise.

Signal To Noise was composed using the slowly evolving output of a Yamaha SY77 as the basis of its three tracks. Calling the music “sonic sculptures” Henke created the track Studies for Thunder by “feeding short pulses of filtered noise into a complex network of granular delay lines; no natural recordings were used as source material - this is a completely artificial world” [Henke, Signal]. Despite its artificiality there is something undeniably “alive” in the music – the granular synthesis is married to a deep crackle and reverberation, offering the listener a warm and rich listening experience. In a similar manner Layering Buddha was constructed from samples from a “FM3 Buddha Machine”, a cheap plastic-encased digital unit that replays nine music loops to aid the listener in meditation, or to be enjoyed as background music. Henke transposed the samples, extending, editing and altering the sounds, revealing, a subterranean sound world within its shifting pointillist soundscapes.

If Henke’s music poetically suggests landscapes and spaces, Christina Kubisch’s audio artworks reveal electronic sounds lurking in the landscape beyond the realm of normal hearing. Like the subconscious listeners of Prince of Darkness, the participants in Kubisch’s “sound walks” are also aerials. Participants wear a pair of electromagnetic induction headphones and a portable recorder and wander the streets, investigating the revealed sound. Kubisch, a sound artist working since the 1970s, has released albums based on these site-specific events staged in various cities including Paris, Tokyo, Madrid, London New York and Berlin.

65 Kubisch’s Magnetic City [2008] created a sound map of a part of Paris that was determined by the participants: “Some people walked straight and without stopping through the streets, others often stopped and played around by moving their head (or body) when entering an interesting field, some followed the “historical paths“, others used the personal itineraries of their daily life, some just went by chance and took the exploration as a kind of acoustic adventure” [Kubisch, Notes, 2008]. Drawn by the attraction of signal, the listeners discovered a shadow world of pulses drones and clicks.

Often what you can see normally and what you hear electromagnetically, is quite different: quiet streets burst out with strong electrical hums, the lively market place is quiet instead, the train station is a dense net of regular beats and clicks, the parking Carnot is the place where antennas fill the air with internet signals, the ATM machines of the banks hum musical chords and the security gates in the shopping streets surprise by their volume and intensity of continuous signals [Kubisch, Notes, 2008].

Kubisch’s Five Electrical Walks [2007] consists of five tracks mixed from recordings made in various cities between 2003 and 2007 while Magnetic Flights [2011] is composed from recordings made by the artist in airports and on board aircraft. The listening experience provided by these albums beyond their original context is remarkably intense. The track Magnetic Flights is akin to listening to oscillators and beeping machines that coalesce into mind-altering drones and, while the accompanying track In Transition is more listenable due its low volume, both tracks are equally uncompromising in the collection of interference patterns, mobile phone crackles and distant beeping.

Kubisch’s sound work is barely reverberant – there is no traditional sense of space or musical dynamic – but it is undeniably a ‘spatial’ listening experience. The listener has a sense of a landscape that is described by shifting levels of volume, stereo separation and the interweaving of sonic textures. Where Henke’s sound is monumental, and Czukay’s is romantic, Kubisch’s is both deep and shallow, like the never ceasing vibration inside the ear of someone with tinnitus. Each of these musician/artists represents three different but complimentary aspects of the science fictional sound field.

66 Sounds As Yet Unheard

The auditory zone of SF is technological in nature, in that ‘technology’ is perceived to be integral to its aesthetic. Although an acoustic guitar or piano might be considered a kind of technology, it is also now considered as almost akin to something natural when compared to a synthesiser or sampler. But technology, like culture, is a relational field of interconnected assumptions and associations. The use of music and sound technology largely determines the reception of its science fictional ideas and attitudes, from phases of initial experimentation and novelty, then to acceptance and ubiquity and, eventually, to a renewed sense of inquiry and reinvention. The science fictional sound field is also symptomatic of changing attitudes to technology, from its symbolic enactment of notions of futurity, modernity and progress to a nostalgic embodiment of the past. It underwrites the fictive space of SF narrative while it encodes and transmits via cultural reverb its messages to the listener. It remains a vital component of generic SF and its wider influence on society, where sound exists now, and how we sing the future.

67 Density

68 The Visionary Present Ballardian Space-Time, Cultural Density & The Aesthetics of Entropy

Charm of the Waste Land

Pierre DuPont drives to Paris on the A11. It is a bright Sunday morning. He arrives at the airport, parks his car in Row J of Level 2 of the parking station and makes his way to the Air France check-in desk. He is travelling to Bangkok. Once through customs and passport check, and after buying a paperback for reading during the trip, he has some time before his flight is called. He pauses on the concourse and considers the scene.

These days, surely, it was in these crowded places where thousands of individual itineraries converged for a moment, unaware of one another, that there survived something of the uncertain charm of the waste land, the yards and building sites, the station platforms and waiting rooms where travellers break step, of all the chance meetings places where fugitive feelings occur, of the possibility of continuing adventure, the feeling that all there is to do is ‘see what happens’ [Augé, 2008: 2].

This scenario is the prologue to Marc Augé’s Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. The prose is crisp and precise. It is a scene that describes a number of the key aspects of Augé’s theory of the non-place, the socially dynamic space of the motorway, the airport lounge and the shopping mall. These are modern spaces that demand a particular interaction between people, a social and spatial relationship prescribed by form and function. For Augé the non-place is the harbinger of the future, a supermodern future captured in that fleeting moment when desire is captured between an array of perfumes, bottles of gin and the matte black electronics of a duty free store.

69 In Augé’s story there are the traces of another writer. Like the needle of a Geiger counter kicking up at the fist sign of radioactivity, this influence can be detected in the powerfully visual — “waste land” – a phrase especially effective for its deployment in a scene redolent of the clean and polished world of an airport lounge. That trace of influence turns into a storm of noise in the incantatory linking of ‘building sites, station platforms and waiting rooms’. The influence here is of the writer J.G. Ballard, a science fiction author whose very name now describes this world, its space and time, and the estrangements of the contemporary moment.

Density as Metaphor

In the last chapter we considered the proposition that the transmission of an idea through cultural space was analogous to reverberation. Like the creation of a sound, an idea radiates outward from a point of origin to bounce back, an ambient ‘noise’ that we perceive as our cultural background. But for a sound to bounce back it first must be reflected. The density of a reflective material determines the strength of that reflection, and so, in our continuing investigation, let’s consider for a moment the idea of cultural density.

For reasons that are ultimately unexplained, certain texts become more influential than others. These texts might be said to present a different point of view, are in some way timely, or perhaps synthesize an unconscious longing in both author and audience that is a conscious embodiment of that desire. Whatever the reason, one senses a real cultural weight to their presence. In the science fiction genre, films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey [Kubrick, 1967] and Blade Runner [Scott, 1982], the novels of William Gibson’s - such as Neuromancer [1984] - and the oeuvre of Philip K. Dick have attracted a considerable amount of critical attention. Not only are they singular works, they encapsulate something of their time: Kubrick’s metaphysical adventure story is both a distillation of classical SF ideas born from the writing of Arthur C. Clarke [its screenwriter and the author of the original short story upon which the film was based], but it also embodied the future-dreaming of NASA missions in the decade leading up to the Moon landing in 1969; Scott’s Blade Runner was an initial box office failure but eventually proved to be one of the most influential SF films of the last 30 years. In addition to the six subsequent versions re-released at various times since 1982 [NA, IMDB], Blade Runner has been the basis of book-length

70 studies and critical evaluations — typing its title into Google Scholar returns 30,200 citations. Gibson’s novel is considered the quintessential cyberpunk novel with 8,000 citations, while his name elicits 25,200 returns. Dick’s work as a writer has launched a host of academic studies, conferences and publications with 49,600 citations. Not only has Dick’s work been anthologized and reprinted on numerous occasions since first publication his short stories and novels have also ‘inspired’ more than 15 short films and features, of which Blade Runner is one of the best known, but it’s a list that also includes Total Recall [Verhoeven, 1990], Screamers [Duguay, 1995], Imposter [Fleder, 2001], Minority Report [Spielberg, 2002] and A Scanner Darkly [Linklater, 2006], among others.

These are four examples of cultural density; two films, and the work of two authors. A work, or body of works, over time accumulates attention and critical analysis, a process that may take a few years, or several decades, or even centuries to reach critical mass. Once that mass is reached, the work becomes a major reference point within a genre, and if the effect is intense enough, radiates out into the wider cultural sphere. What effect does this kind of density have upon cultural reverb, and how is this effect evidenced in the form of other cultural objects? This chapter examines the work of J.G. Ballard, its broad connections to contemporary culture, Ballard’s specific interests in visual art, and the sorts of work that has been inspired by the cultural weight of his oeuvre. Along the way we consider the relationship between Ballard and critical theory to understand the future trajectory of this super massive influence on the quasi-state of the science fictional.

The Visionary Present

In 1997 the architecture magazine Blueprint commissioned Ballard to write an essay entitled Airports: Cities of The Future. It concerned one of his favourite topics.

Airports and airfields have always held a special magic, gateways to the infinite possibilities that only the sky can offer. In 1946, when I first came to England, a dark and derelict shell of a country, I used to dream of the runways of Wake Island and Midway, stepping stones that would carry me back across the Pacific to the China of my childhood [Ballard, 1997: 26].

71 James Graham Ballard was born in November 1930 in Shanghai, China. During World War 2 he was interned in a civilian prisoner-of-war camp and in 1946 was repatriated to England, the homeland of his parents [Stableford, 1999: 35]. Forced to leave the only country that he had known for a country he had never visited, Ballard was alienated from both. Studying medicine at King’s College at Cambridge, the future author would take any opportunity to glimpse the future: “I would flee all that fossilized Gothic self-immersion and ride a borrowed motorcycle to the American airbases at Mildenhall and Lakenheath, happy to stare through the wire at the lines of silver bombers and transport planes”. For Ballard, these airports were where “the world of tomorrow touched down in Europe” [Ballard, 1997: 26].

In the early 1950s, after leaving Cambridge without a degree, Ballard served with the RAF in Canada. Returning once more to the UK he worked for a scientific film company and as the assistant editor of a chemical engineering magazine. His first two short published stories Prima Belladonna and Escapement were both published in December 1956 in, respectively, Science Fantasy and New Worlds. Both stories signaled the emergence of a major new talent. Wrote critics John Clute and David Pringle, “From the first, his writing was influenced by the Surrealist painters and the early Pop artists, and it was soon clear he was capable of opening up new prospects for SF” [Clute, Pringle, “Ballard”]. Prima Belladonna was set in Vermillion Sands, a Las Vegas-like coastal resort, and concerned the languid lives of artists, poets and sculptors. Although the story featured plants and insects that emitted audible sounds, its location was a recognizable, if exotic, world. By contrast, Escarpment was set in that most domestic of English settings – the living room – and concerns the story of a man and wife who realise that time is repeating. Far from the galactic-scale space opera of Golden Age SF, Ballard’s work drew much of its power from its contemporary setting. “I was interested in the real future that I could see approaching, and less in the invented future that science fiction preferred” Ballard later wrote. “Vermillion Sands isn’t set in the future at all, but in a kind of visionary present – a description that fits [the short stories] and almost everything else I have written” [Ballard, 2001: ix].

Ballard was prolific short story writer but the money he earned for his debut novel The Wind From Nowhere [1961] enabled him to become a writer full time [Clute, Pringle, “Ballard”]. His subsequent novels The Drowned World [1962], The Drought

72 [1965] and The Crystal World [1966] imagined worldwide disaster through a series of cataclysms that embodied both interior and exterior psychologies, as if the landscape manifested the inner states of the novels characters. “In all of Ballard’s stories,” wrote Brian Stableford, ”he world has become a wilderness, transformed by lurid disaster or the collapse of civilization or the prolonged exaggeration of destructive social processes already familiar today” [Stableford. 1999: 36]. Stableford also saw Ballard’s novels of this period as coming from a particularly English tradition.

British imaginative fiction of the twentieth century is replete with great plagues, cosmic disasters, nuclear holocausts, and climactic catastrophes; Ballard was, therefore, working within a well-established tradition. Almost all the earlier works in this tradition, though, are manifestly didactic tales that strive to remind us of the vulnerability of the human world [Stableford, 1999: 36-37]

Stableford saw Ballard’s novels as also counter to this tradition, unconcerned with tales of hubris and survival, the author “…neither an alarmist nor a moralist … rather his narrative voice possess a remote and clinical objectivity that is interested solely in the minute observation of the psychological readjustments that the various characters take” [Stableford, 1999: 37]. A number of critics have speculated why Ballard chose to write within the genre of SF when he also chose to ignore or upend many of its most cherished traditions [Baxter, 2008; Luckhurst, 1997; Gasiorek, 2005, et al]. Jeanette Baxter argues that, for Ballard, “science fiction’s expansive vision promised to respond to the competing vocabularies of the late 20th century – science, technology, advertising, capitalism, consumerism – in a way that just might make sense” [Baxter, 2008: 4]. The genre promised what Ballard had seen across the tarmac of the American air force bases.

Inner Space | New Worlds

Ballard’s stylistic and thematic approach to SF wasn’t easily accepted by the more conservative genre readers of the early 1960s. Ballard was a divisive figure because, aside from his short stories and novels, he was also a polemicist. A piece written for New Worlds in 1962 entitled Which Way To Inner Space? called for the revitalization of the genre by the refusal of its most popular elements – space travel, ray guns,

73 aliens, and robots – in favour of a psychologically complex and provocative experimentalism. “I’ve often wondered why SF shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterised painting, music, and the cinema in the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartedly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid” [Ballard, 1996: 197]. The biggest developments would not occur in space, claimed Ballard, but on Earth. “It is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only true alien planet is Earth” [Ballard, 1996: 197].

While Ballard’s manifesto is perhaps one of the earliest examples of the intermittent schisms that occur within the culture of science fiction [as discussed in chapter 1], it is worth considering this proclamation of inner space within its historical context. Roger Luckhurst traces the history of the coinage of the term to J.B. Priestley’s 1953 article They Come from inner Space in which SF is seen as a “set of contemporary myths, deploying the familiar equation of the popular and the unconscious” and that these myths are “characteristic dreams of our age, and are psychologically far more important than our own rational accounts of ourselves’” [Priestly, quoted in Luckhurst, 1997: 49]. The term recurs in the writing of psychologist of R.D. Laing, in Jane Dunlop’s Exploring Inner Space [both in 1962], and the term was used by William Burroughs in a lecture at the Writers Conference in Edinburgh [also late 1962] [Luckhurst, 1997: 49-50]. Ballard, no doubt in tune with the broad sweep of popular culture in the decades after World War 2, would have been aware of the term’s usage but its deployment within the culture of SF was a way of connecting the genre to the experimental and speculative practices of film, music and art that had striven for psychological depth. As Jeanette Baxter argues the concept of ‘inner space’ for Ballard was “a series of shifting and hybrid imaginative geographies in which the outer world of reality and the inner world of the psyche fuse in a number of fascinating and startling ways” [Baxter, 2008: 4].

Ballard’s conceptual thinking about the practice of writing was intimately connected to his interpretation of Surrealism. While rejecting its automatic writing practices, he understood its distinctions between inner consciousness, fantasy and dream, and the outer world of appearances. In an interview in Studio International [1971] Ballard made the observation that “Surrealism took one of its main inspirations from

74 psychoanalysis [and] accepted the distinction between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality” [Whitford, 1971]. However, 40 years on from the high water mark of the movement, Ballard saw a change in reality.

The world of the mind, is largely ruled by the laws of fictions, by one's dreams, visions, impressions and so on, and the whole idea of the unconscious as a narrative stage. Surrealism moulds the two worlds together, remakes the external world of reality in terms of the internal world of fantasy and fictions. Now what has happened … is that this position has been reversed. It's the external world which is now the realm, the paramount realm of fantasy. And it's the internal world of the mind which is the one node of reality that most of us have. The fiction is all out there. You can't overlay your own fiction on top of that [Whitford, 1971].

The association between Ballard and Surrealism, and Pop art, has been asserted by a number of critics – and we shall discuss these connections – but what Ballard is essentially claiming is that the real had been surpassed by fantasy, that somehow the internal had been externalized, the real superseded by fiction. Ballard’s proto- post modern world view was radically different to most other SF writers and his polemical position, coupled with his association with Surrealist aesthetic strategies – shock, violence, pornography, abstraction – often found him compared to Andre Breton, founder and chief theorist/polemicist of the Surrealist movement. Christopher Priest wrote in 1980 that Ballard was the “Andre Breton of s.f.” and that “the so-called classics of SF had been written by authors who simply misunderstood the possibilities of their chosen literature” [Priest, 1980:190].

The possibilities of the SF genre explored by avant-garde SF writers in the 1960s was collectively dubbed the New Wave. As we discussed in chapter 1, the New Wave was a transatlantic phenomenon with its spiritual home in London, and centred around Michael Moorcock’s tenure from 1964 to 1971 as editor of the magazine New Worlds. A talented writer and fierce polemicist himself, Moorcock’s editorship was more “flamboyant” than his predecessors “juxtaposing fiction with factual social comment, visual collage, even concrete poetry, in a deliberate attempt to lose the Genre-SF image and to place speculative fiction in a context of rapid social change, and radical art generally” [Stableford, Nichols, Adlard, “New Worlds”].

75 Critical Mass

Within this milieu, Ballard continued to produce short stories that pushed the limits of then-acceptable content while conceptualising his short fictions as ‘condensed novels’. The first of these short stories was You and Me and the Continuum [1966] which was followed by a series of stories that conflated Surrealism, Pop and techniques of collage that were collected as The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]. As Andrzej Gasiorek argues, these stories were “multi-perspectival” in which the reader could “inspect” a scene from multiple angles. Writes Gasiorek:

The chapters are all linked by shared preoccupations, which run through the [book]: celebrity culture of the 1960s; the power of the telecommunications industry to mediate reality; the assassination of iconic figures [most notably John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe]; the phenomenology of space-time; the death of affect; the social significance of the space program; and the prevalence of violence in a society increasingly in thrall to an apocalyptic imaginary haunted by images of an impending World War Three, which is figured … by a possibly redemptive conceptual cataclysm [Gasiorek, 2005: 17].

The outcome of this technique is the achievement of a “’critical mass’ that generates ‘crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that in themselves begin to generate new matter’” [Ballard, quoted in Gasiorek, 2005: 17]. Ballard’s evolution as a writer took another step with the publication in 1973 of Crash. Where the stories at the core of The Atrocity Exhibition had been dense and collaged, Crash by contrast was alarmingly simple, written in the language of pornographic realism where every facet of anatomy, structure and injury was described in calm, detailed prose. Crash’s narrator is ‘James Ballard’ a man recovering from a car accident sustained while driving near Heathrow airport. Through the figure of Vaughn, an aficionado of car accidents and assassinations with a fixation on Elizabeth Taylor — Ballard discovers an underground world of erotic automobile fetishism and sado-masochistic sex. As the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes:

76 Ballard took his obsession with automobile accidents to a logical conclusion. Perhaps the best example of "pornographic" SF, it explores the psychological satisfactions of danger, mutilation and death on the roads; it is also an examination of the interface between modern humanity and its machines. Brightly lit and powerfully written, it is a work with which it is difficult for many readers to come to terms; one publisher's reader wrote of the manuscript: ‘The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help’ [Clute, Pringle, “Ballard”].

Ballard’s powerful work lies in the joining of its theme and writerly technique, the conflation of the author with the fiction proving a subtle but profoundly estranging experience. Some critics have noted the novel’s sense of ambivalence and abstraction. “The novel’s brilliance derives in part from its over determined nature: it can never finally decide what kind of text it is – a moral tract, or a paean to the joys of sexual violence?” states Andrzej Gasiorek [Gasiorek, 2005: 18]. Gasiorek argues that the novel occupies an unresolved position.

This indecision makes it a liminal work that blurs the boundary between the moral and immoral, and it keeps crossing back and forth between these discourses. It is neither a ludic nor a fashionably relativistic text but rather a serious and unsettling exploration of the ambiguities that arise when easily agreed distinctions between these categories break down [Gasiorek, 2005: 18].

Ballard followed Crash with two novels that reiterated many of the themes of that breakthrough work: Concrete Island [1974], which told the story of a man stranded on a road island surviving on whatever scraps he could find, and High Rise [1975] about the descent into savagery by the residents of a high rise apartment building in the centre of London. Although considered by many to be lesser works, they set the thematic tone for Ballard’s later run of novels that began in the mid-1990s with Cocaine Nights [1996]. In the two decades in between Ballard experimented with metaphysical allegory in The Unlimited Dream Company [1979], with satire in Hello America! [1981], and quasi-memoir in the form of the fictionalised account of his time in the internment camp outside Shanghai in Empire of The Sun [1984], and in its nominal sequel, The Kindness of Women [1991], both told in with his customary detached style.

During the 1990s and 2000s Ballard emerged as a commentator in the British media with a profoundly acerbic view of current events, but also as an acute observer on everything from art exhibitions and television to developments within science fiction, writing for newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Times, Vogue, The Daily Telegraph and Playboy [Baxter, 2008: 1]. Lionized by writers such as Will Self and Martin Amis [whose father Kingsley Amis had celebrated and promoted Ballard’s work in the early 1960s], Ballard continued to produce novels that managed to be considered both science fiction without many of the traditional genre cues and read widely as mainstream literature. Although the 1996 film adaptation of Crash by David Cronenberg was momentarily controversial in the UK upon its release – and was banned for a short time — Ballard enjoyed a late career marked by a widely held respect for his achievements.

During the 2000s Ballard produced three novels: Super-Cannes [2000], Millennium People [2003] and Kingdom Come [2006]. Following the template of Cocaine Nights – and the earlier novella Running Wild [1988] – the stories of these last works were variations on a central theme — the collapse of bourgeois society in microcosm. With simple narratives of slow revelation – the central characters inevitably drawn from observers to participants in the mayhem – the works were powerful if remarkably repetitive, a stylistic and narrative sameness that was alleviated by Ballard’s precise prose. Baxter claimed that Ballard had been prescient in his vision. Citing an essay that Salman Rushdie had written for The New Yorker that claimed [in part] that Princess Diana’s life and death and been ‘sketched out’ by Crash, Baxter suggested that the bombing of Heathrow Terminal 2 that opens Millennium People foresaw a terrorist emergency the same year: “Within months of the novel’s completion anti- terrorist forces rolled into Heathrow Airport in response to a threatened Al-Queda attack” [Baxter, 2008: 2]. Andrzej Gasiorek argued that the final novels offered a sense of a conclusion, an historic ending that ‘haunted’ the books.

Time has contracted down to a depleted present stretching out to a blank future; change is ceaseless and ever more rapid, but it takes place with a globalized, technology-driven system that seems uncannily adaptable and fearfully resolute. This is post-modernity as end-game and terminal zone, the site of capitalist colonization so complete that temporality has been evacuated

78 from it and can only be conceived in terms of spatial extension: more buildings, roads, airports, shopping malls, car parks. Look closely, remarks a Ballardian figure, pointing towards an advancing [housing] estate, ‘and you can see the future moving towards you’ [Gasiorek, 2005: 20].

Roger Luckhurst remarked that Ballard’s early catastrophe novels were “inextricably intertwined with the intensification of eschatological thought contained in that much contested denotation of epoch: the Sixties” [Luckhurst, 1997: 50]. Like the work of that period, Ballard’s final output as a writer was as intertwined with the tenor of its time, the end of time itself always a shadow on the present. Ballard died in April 2009, aged 78.

Ballardian Aesthetics

As we can see from this summary, Ballard’s work was extensive, covering five decades from his first published story in 1956 to his final novel in 2006. A major figure within SF as well as a ‘mainstream’ literary novelist he is also one of the very few writers whose name has become synonymous with a particular aesthetic that extends beyond the page. The Collins Dictionary defines ‘Ballardian’ as something “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels and stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments” [Collinsdictionary.com].

There is a certain magic that is conjured in the recitation of the features of the Ballardian landscape: according to Baxter, the term ‘Ballardian’ “functions as a kind of trigger for conjuring up a series of distinctive images and landscapes which capture the contemporary condition in all of its violence and ambiguity; murdered celebrities, crashed cars, surveillance technologies, media politicians, gated communities. Vast shopping malls, drowned cities, nuclear weapons ranges and testing sites, landscaped business parks” [Baxter, 2008: 2]. But beyond the list of these powerful if now familiar images, the Ballardian image’s “resonance lies less in their straightforward recognisability and more in the way in which these familiar aspects of contemporary culture are rendered strange and unnerving” [Baxter, 2008: 2].

Fig 3.1 Ed Ruscha, Fountain of Crystal, 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 76x91cm. Collection: Gagosian Gallery, London.

In 2010 a tribute exhibition Crash: A Homage to JG Ballard was staged at London’s Gagosian Gallery. The work of 56 artists were included in the show, from artists who had inspired Ballard, and who he had included in his writings – both fiction and non- fiction – such as Salvador Dali, Paul Delvaux, Georgio De Chirico, Roy Lichtenstein and Any Warhol – to artists who were contemporaries and friends such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton – and many younger artists who had made work in direct tribute to Ballard, or were indirectly inspired by his work, such as Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tacita Dean, Mike Brown, Jane and Louise Wilson and Damien Hirst. The work ranged from a literal representation of Ballardian images – mushroom clouds, highways, council towers, pornography – to more abstract and provocative engagements such as Ed Ruscha’s Fountain of Crystal [2009] [Fig 3.1] – a painting of a snow covered ridge with text taken from Crash reading “A fountain of spraying crystal erupted around them” – to Adam McEwen’s Honda Teen Facial [2010] [Fig

80 3.2] – the installation of a complete Boeing 747 undercarriage in the gallery space. Perhaps by design, or by accident, the exhibition encapsulated the Ballardian relationship to the visual arts, its enunciation literal and metaphorical, descriptive and abstract. Let’s consider some of the traces of the Ballardian aesthetic within modern and contemporary visual arts and attempt to map a relationship between the critical mass of Ballard and his writings, and the effect this has had on those cultural objects caught in its orbit.

This Is Tomorrow

Ballard’s life long interest in contemporary art, and his engagement with it, is virtually unique in SF. In 1956 the Whitechapel Gallery staged This Is Tomorrow, an exhibition in which “architects, artists, designers and critics took part in a project designed to challenge perceived boundaries between the visual arts and promote dialogue between practitioners” [McSherry, 2010]. Among other works created by teams of collaborating artists, including former members of London’s Independent Group, the show featured Richard Hamilton’s proto-Pop collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? Ballard visited the exhibition and it had a profound effect. “To go to the Whitechapel in 1956 and to see my experience of the real world being commented upon, played back to me with all kinds of ironic gestures, that was tremendously exciting,” he later commented. [Whitford, 1971]. For Ballard, Abstract Expressionism – another dominant style of the time – was representative of the past, whereas Pop embodied the hyper-contemporaneous moment of the future.

Abstract Expressionism struck me as being about yesterday [and] was profoundly retrospective, profoundly passive, and it wasn't serious. Why I became a science-fiction writer … was because the future was clearly better and the past was clearly worse. Abstract Expressionism didn't share the overlapping, jostling vocabularies of science, technology, advertising the new realms of communication. This is Tomorrow came a year before the flight of the first Sputnik, but the technologies that launched the space age were already underpinning the consumer-goods society in those days. … If an art doesn't embrace the whole terrain, all four horizons, it's worth nothing [Whitford, 1971].

Fig 3.2 Adam McEwan, Honda Teen Facial, 2010. Boeing 747 undercarriage, approximately 350x300x182cm. Private Collection.

The effect of Pop upon Ballard’s writing was, according to Gasiorek, “an imaginative liberation because [Pop art] refused to disavow the materiality of culture, treating the growth of technology, consumerism and the mass media as the everyday data to which the arts should respond, and as the substance out of which the their works would be assembled” [Gasiorek, 2005: 14]. Ballard shaped a singular aesthetic through the genre of science fiction, one that conjoined with the culturally discursive, willfully disruptive and ironic position of Pop and the psychic liberation of Surrealist practice.

Fig 3.3 J. G. Ballard, Project for A New Novel [detail], 1958.

Ballard experimented with the visual extension of his writing in several projects. Project For A New Novel [1958] [Fig 3.3] was conceived, according to Rick McGrath, in direct response to This Is Tomorrow: “Ballard was strongly affected by that exhibition’s interest in collage and the artistic use of everyday or found objects — in this case, the words, text, charts and page layouts of the scientific magazines he edited” [McGrath, 2009]. A ‘condensed novel’ that was reduced down to two double- page spreads, the work was designed to be published on a billboard and, although the project was never completed, “had it ever been produced, [it] might have been the first instance of art being published on outdoor media” [McGrath, 2009]. Ballard

83 followed this unrealized project a decade later with a series of Advertisers Announcements [1967-1971] [Fig 3.4], five collage/ads that appeared in a variety of underground magazines including Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and others [Vale, 1984: 38]. For Ballard, the project was a way of delivering an idea within the frame of an understood generic package – a magazine ad – that could communicate a fragmented narrative over the course of the sequence.

Instead of advertising a product I would advertise an idea…and this is a very effective way of putting them over. If these ideas were in the middle of a short story people could ignore them… But if they’re presented in the form of an advertisement, like one in Vogue magazine, or Life magazine, people have to look at them, they have to think about them [Ballard, quoted in McGrath, 2009].

In April 1970 the exhibition Jim Ballard: Crashed Cars opened at the New Arts Lab. The exhibition consisted of three crashed cars, a Pontiac, an Austin Cambridge A60 and a Mini [Ford, ‘Seconds’]. Where the billboard and magazine ad works had been a logical extension of his fiction – appearing in printed media – Crashed Cars was a step into an entirely new arena; an exhibition of found objects. Ballard had been involved in planning an adaptation of story elements for a play to be entitled Crash, and one of his short stories was adapted as a mixed media performance staged at the ICA in London in 1969, however, Crashed Cars marked the author’s debut as an exhibiting artist. The opening was staged as part-social event, part-performance, with invited guests interviewed by a topless woman for a live feed to CCTV monitors. Ballard wrote of the event in The Kindness of Women and, forgiving a degree of dramatic fictionalization, the exhibition proved provocative.

The result, according to Ballard, was 'nervous hysteria.' Guests poured wine over the cars, broke their glasses and the topless interviewer, Ballard claimed, 'was nearly raped in the back seat of the Pontiac by some self- aggrandizing character.’ The exhibition continued to act as a stimulus to transgressive acts well after the opening party. In the following days visitors repeatedly attacked the cars, daubed them in paint, broke windows, tore off wing mirrors, and urinated on the seats [Ford, ‘Seconds’].

84 Given the highly politicised context of visual arts in the early 1970s, it’s entirely possible that Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars was seen as a provocation, and, indeed, it was intended on one level to be so. Simon Ford cites numerous examples of cars being used in visual art of that decade, as images in paintings, photos and screen-prints, or as ready-made sculptures, by an array of artists including John Chamberlain, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Cesar, Arman and Ed Keinholz [whose work Dodge 38 was described in a section of The Atrocity Exhibition] [Ford, ‘Seconds’] Ballard’s gallery text was laced with startling ideas, claiming in part that the car crash was a transformative event, a symbolic encapsulation of the human-machine interface: “Apart from its function of redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may be perceived unconsciously as a fertilising rather than a destructive event – a liberation of sexual energy – meditating the asexuality [sic] of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form” [Ballard, quoted in Ford, ‘Seconds’]. It is within this notion that time and space is redefined within an object that we find a trajectory for the consideration of the influence of the Ballardian aesthetic.

Fig 3.4 J.G Ballard. Venus Smiles, Advertisers Announcement #5, 1970. Magazine advertisement, variable sizes.

86 Fig 3.5 Florian Maier-Aichen, One Day at Spiral Jetty, 2009. Gelatin silver print, 24x30cm. Private collection.

Time & Space

One of the works included in the 2010 Ballard tribute exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery was a photograph by Florian Maier-Aichen entitled One Day At Spiral Jetty [Fig 3.5], a moody image taken at dusk on the shore of a salt lake in Utah. Its connection to Ballard requires a little deciphering and an understanding of the connection between Ballard and the creator of the land artwork depicted in the photograph, Robert Smithson. Although the two never met, Smithson was well aware of Ballard’s writing. In his essay The Artist As Site-Seer: Or, A Dintorphic Essay [1966-67] Smithson cites Ballard’s The Waiting Grounds [1959] and its story of ambiguous monolithic objects that stand as if outside time. The megaliths are encoded with letters and numbers, but encodings of what exactly? For Smithson these were structures that were seeded with language that prompted him to wonder,

87 “Is the verbal prior to the material?” [Smithson, 1996: 341]. If language is contained within an object, that is, its material is like Ballard’s crashed cars an idea, then:

The ‘noise of history’ is contained by Ballard’s megaliths. The abyss of language erases the supposed meaning of general history and leaves an awesome ‘babel’. These megalithic rectangles are Ballard’s memory traces of that elusive prime object – the Tower of Babel [Smithson, 1996: 341].

Like a Ballardian anti-hero, Smithson was attempting to synchronise the cosmic forces of his historical moment, seeking out the fundamental truths of geometry and form, seeing within the form of the Great Pyramid “an awesome computer, based on orbital chronologies and shifting calendars” [Smithson, 1996: 341] – the kind of form that he would create in sand, basalt and water. Robert A. Sobieszek charts Smithson’s interest in SF in the 1960s, the numerous references and quotations of SF texts within his unpublished writings, a 1967 outline written by Smithson for a “documentary film featuring ‘rock and roll science fiction type sound’, and unrealized speculative projects to build a monument in Antarctica. [Sobieszek, 2004: 143]. But unlike many of Ballard’s protagonists, Smithson did indeed create his masterwork, Spiral Jetty [1970] [Fig 3.6].

In his essay Entropy and The New Monuments [1966] Smithson stated that “Many architectural concepts found in science-fiction have nothing to do with science or fiction, instead they suggest a new kind of monumentality which has much in common with the aims of some of today's artists” [Smithson, 1996: 26]. Ballard’s influence was a key element of Smithson’s thinking on the idea of the sculptural object as a ‘container’ for time. Spiral Jetty was built using black basalt rocks and earth from the site, a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide that stretches out counter- clockwise into the translucent red water [N.A. Dia Center]. For Smithson, the work was as much about bearing the trace of passing time – of entropy - as it was designed to capture its process in sculptural form. “I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation,” wrote Smithson. “I am talking about a dialectic of nature that interacts with the physical contradictions inherent in natural forces as they are — nature as both sunny and stormy. Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished” [Smithson, 345: 1996].

Fig 3.6 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water, 457.2x4.57m. Dia Foundation.

Frederic Jameson argued that a key aspect of the postmodern condition was the ‘discontinuous spatial experience’ – the fragmentation of perception in both inner and outer worlds. “If experience and expression still seem largely apt in the cultural sphere of the modern, they are altogether out of place and anachronistic in a postmodern age, where if temporality still had its place, it would seem better to speak of the writing of it than of lived experience” [Jameson, 1991: 154]. To illustrate his point, Jameson cited Ballard’s short story The Voices of Time finding within it, the appearance of a “fin des siècle Wagnerian modernism or some grandiose and musical sociobiology” but, upon closer inspection it revealed an author working with “the multiple signatures of Time itself” [Jameson, 1991: 155]. The narrative of The Voices of Time [1964] is the revelation that the end of the universe is approaching, interstellar signals from the constellation Canes Venatici counting down to zero. The countdown emanates from a spiral galaxy in the constellation and, driven by an unconscious force, various characters create drawings and sculptures that replicate its pattern. Jameson argued that Ballard’s story was

a story about ‘future’ art or post modern aesthetics - indeed the opposition between two new kinds of spatial art, the mandala of the sixties built by the hero in the last stages of his own narcoma, at the centre of which he will expire, and the ‘atrocity exhibit’ of the other, Byronic figure, which foreshadows Ballard’s own later work in its conception of the newer art as a version of that emergent form of ‘creative exhibitions’ high-tech reproductive traces, from X-Rays to print outs – of the moist atrocious traumas of the post contemporary world [Jameson, 1991: 156].

Jameson argued that an artwork was capable of depicting the world, the social, cultural and ‘natural — those often antagonistic concepts — within a single object. For Jameson, writing in 1991, the new strain of post modern art emerging at the time, the reflexive, quotational and ironic art of the late 1980s, was a key reference point in understanding the temporal/spatial alienation effect of late capitalism [Jameson, 1991: 168-9]. In this context, Ballard and Smithson would be seen as Romantic poets of late modernism hankering for a cathartic end point to validate the eschatological spirit of their age. However, some twenty years into the future, the ironic reflections of post modernity have palled in the face of time while Smithson’s sculpture has moved

90 from cultural object into the realm of cultural idea. That the Spiral Jetty can now rarely be seen has not diminished its force as a provocative idea of time and space.

The Aesthetic Language of Entropy

In 1970 when Smithson built Spiral Jetty the water level of the salt lake on which it is sited was at a historic low. As the Center for Land Use Interpretation records, “as a result the piece only occasionally rises to the levels of perceptibility, within the visual conundrum that is the Great Salt Lake” [N.A. CLUI, ‘Spiral’]. In the late 1990s, British artist Tacita Dean decided to see if she could find a trace of the work. Traveling to Utah and using complicated directions to find the lake and jetty some two hours from Salt Lake City and 12 miles into the wilderness of the Golden Spike National Historic Site, Dean produced a number of works from the trip, including a sound recording Trying To Find The Spiral Jetty [1997] and an installation projection of 35mm slides Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah [1999] [Fig 3.7]. The sound work was based on recordings of Dean and a travelling companion attempting to find the Jetty, which was later embellished and supplemented turning the piece into an extended work of fiction. Ultimately the trip led the pair to Rozel Point, adjacent to Smithson’s work, but there was nothing to see except a vast expanse of calm water.

Dean had been friendly with Ballard and, in 1997 when Trying To Find The Spiral Jetty was exhibited, Ballard sent the artist a copy of a catalogue essay he had written on Smithson’s work. Writing a tribute to Ballard after his death Dean recalled:

Beneath the Great Salt Lake was, for some, the centre of an ancient universe, and his jetty could have been an elaborate means to bore down to get to it. As if understanding this, Ballard wrote in the catalogue text: "What cargo might have berthed at the Spiral Jetty?" He elaborated later to me in a letter: "My guess is that the cargo was a clock, of a very special kind. In their way, all clocks are labyrinths, and can be risky to enter." The two men had a lot in common, and Ballard believed [Smithson] to be the most important and most mysterious of postwar US artists. My interest in time, cosmic and human, future and past, as well as the analogue spooling of the now, has Ballard at its core [Dean, 2009].

91 As Dean’s two Ballardian works based on the trip to the Great Salt Lake demonstrate, the Jamesonian notion of a discontinuous spatial experience is not related to postmodernity alone, and that indeed, the experience of entropy is continuous or, as Dean puts it, the ‘analogue of spooling of now’ is brought into sharp focus by the forces of nature, witnessed by the Spiral Jetty. Reflecting on Ballard’s continuing influence on artists and art making, and giving us a clue to the meaning of the Ballardian aesthetic, Dean wrote, that while “Pop art might have given us the freedom to use the detritus of the everyday, … Ballard gave us the aesthetic language of entropy” [Dean, 2009].

Fig 3.7 Tacita Dean. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1997, 1999. 35mm slide projector 35mm slide, variable dimensions. Collection: British Council.

Ballard’s writing distilled a sense of contemporaneity — a ‘visionary present’ and an ’aesthetic language of entropy’ — that continues to accumulate mass. Its trace can be found even where none were intended. Mark Dorrian’s essay Adventure on the Vertical looks at the mis-en-scene of the Eames Office’s classic film Powers of Ten [1977] which depicts scales of the powers of ten, from a dramatic zoom out to the edges of known space, to a sudden and incredible zoom back into the atoms that make up the hand of a picnicking man sleeping on a blanket in a Chicago park. Noting the placement of a book just near the man’s hand Dorrian notes that it is “The Voices of Time, a 1966 collection of essays edited by the Hungarian-American

92 physicist and social scientist Julius Thomas Fraser” [Dorrian, 2011-12] [Fig 3.8]. By chance the title is almost identical to a book of Ballard short stories, The Voices of Time and Other Stories, the title story coincidentally the same fiction that had inspired Smithson. Although they are not the same, Dorrian finds a number of intriguing connections: the main character of the short story name is named Powers, the zoom out and then back into sub-atomic space in the Ray and Charles Eames film “pictures a kind of vertiginous, abyssal collapse of the everyday reality with which the film begins” [Dorrian, 2011-12], a description of many of Ballard’s fictions.

Fig 3.8 Powers of Ten. Dir. Charles & Ray Eames. IBM/Office of Charles & Ray Eames, 1977. Film.

93 Ballardian Density

J.G. Ballard’s work and thematic preoccupations created a distinct aesthetic that gave the world the adjective Ballardian. Taken as a sequence of novels and short stories Ballard’s oeuvre is distinctive and, although elements of his work reflect the times in which they were written and connect to simultaneous developments in other areas of cultural production, their ideas remain provocative and relevant. The accumulations of Ballardian density can be found in the work of the artists we have examined in this chapter, such as Robert Smithson and Tacita Dean, while the contemporary artists included in the 2010 Gagosian Gallery tribute exhibition, bear traces of Ballard’s influence. Moreover, the effect of the Ballardian aesthetic can be found in only nominally related works, such as in The Powers of Ten. In comparison to the work and influence of other science fiction writers such as Gibson and Dick - as discussed earlier - Ballard’s work is perhaps an ideal example of cultural density. While it may not have attained the weight of certain other cultural objects the aesthetic has had a much longer after glow that is felt decades after the initial entry of a novel or short story into cultural space. Ballard’s own forays into visual art, from the typographical experiments of his condensed novels, to his exhibition of crashed cars, to his connection and friendship with artists, attest to his interest in areas beyond the written word. This chapter asked what effect does this kind of density have upon cultural reverb, and how is this effect evidenced in the form of other cultural objects. As we have seen, the density of a cultural object - serves as a reflective ‘surface’ in the transmission of ideas and concepts. As one idea grows, it attracts others, and so on, cultural space ever expanding. In Marc Augé’s mini-fiction, Pierre DuPont is a traveller in space, a familiar world made strange by the weight of the Ballardian aesthetic, a space and time both exotic and familiar, a universe of the everyday.

94 Resonance

95 The Colour of Nothing Contemporary Video Art and The Post Modern Sublime

Resonance

Resonance is our final metaphorical effector in the transmission of ideas through cultural space. Although ‘resonance’ has a specific technical meaning within music – in instrument design, acoustics, and in the ways in which sound is heard by the human ear – in this context, resonance is proposed in much the way that it is popularly understood, that is, where a cultural object is said to have great ‘resonance’ – a conceptual continuity at some innate level where ideas, themes and tropes have significant social, emotional and conceptual connection for an audience. This chapter considers the relationship between cultural objects such as film, video art, painting, advertising and children’s television programs and the resonant dialogue between them and their audience. Where does this resonance actually reside? Is it within the cultural object itself? Or does the conception of a cultural object’s ‘resonant’ properties reside with an audience? And where does this resonance come from – is it a startling sense of science fictional contemporaneity, or a connection to the deep past?

Nothing

Let’s begin by considering two very different examples of the sublime in science fiction cinema. In one, a classical pictorial notion of the sublime is rendered with mind-boggling literalness. In the other, a very different kind of sublime is figured, not by the vistas of catastrophe, but by an absence.

In Roland Emmerich’s 2012 [2009] [Fig 4.1], the world is swamped by a series of mega-tsunamis so large they crest even the peaks of the Himalayas. As the President of The United States of America offers comfort to the citizenry of Washington already struck by disaster [ash clouds, earthquakes, fires] a low rumbling signals the advance of a wall of water; the President looks up to the crest of the

96 gigantic wave and, as he mutters his last words, the USS John F. Kennedy emerges from the darkness, slowly capsizing, jet fighters toppling from the flight deck, the aircraft carrier dumped on to the White House.

Now let’s do an imaginary jump cut to an all-encompassing whiteness. It is a technological void that is also a prison. In THX 1138 [Lucas, 1971] [Fig 4.2] the title character THX has been found guilty of unauthorized sexual intercourse with a non-designated partner. The theocratic dictatorship of this vast underground city has decreed that THX must be cast out into a technologically generated separation. As his ears ring with the thunderous sounds of nothingness, he ventures through a never-ending dead zone.

Mountain tops, storms at sea, infinity...

The sublime as an aesthetic category has been applied to the visual arts since the mid-18th century. Its roots lie in a discourse on rhetoric and poetics found in “Longinus” that date to the 1st Century AD [McEvilley, 2001: 57] but Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful of 1756 speculated that painting concerned with particular subjects might also evoke the sublime aspect of Romantic poetry.

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger; that is to say whatever is any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling [Burke, 1757: 51].

Burke wasn’t certain that painting could necessarily equal the accomplishments of the written word, since the mind so easily conjures images where the artist struggles with mere illusion, yet Burke’s hope was that the emotional impact of the sublime might somehow be translated to the visual arts through a series of subjects and effects. Burke proposed what he called the terror sublime, a category of the sublime that captured the emotional charge one experiences with scenes of unimaginable immensity, destruction, space and infinitude.

Fig. 4.1 2012. Dir. Roland Emmerich. Columbia Pictures/Centropolis Entertainment, 2009. Film.

Fig. 4.2 THX 1138. Dir. George Lucas. American Zoetrope/Warner Bros. 1971. Film.

98 A tradition of painterly visual effects arose in response to Burke’s speculation, and to Immanuel Kant’s later extension of Burke’s theory of the manifestations of limitless nature to the subjectivities of experience [McEvilley, 2001: 63], and which reached its apotheosis in the mid-19th century. When one considers the work of Thomas Cole and John Martin from the middle decades of the 19th century one senses an anticipation of the contemporary imagination. The works of these two artists have been theorised as a kind of pre-cinematic visuality that connects the painterly imagining of apocalypse to an anticipation of the grammar of cinema, from wide screen scenic pictorialism to the logic of montage [1]. These and other aspects of Cole and Martin’s work will be discussed in the next chapter, but for now their paintings suggest to us an intriguing resonance between the popular imagination of the mid-19th century and today.

Roland Emmerich’s 2012 [2009], with its guilty pleasures of mind-numbing, logic- defeating spectacle, embodies the same kind of cultural anxiety that Cole’s Course of Empire sequence of paintings did for its mid-19th century audience [Dahl, 1959: 380]. A comparison of Cole’s The Course of Empire: Destruction [1836] [Fig 4.3] or Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath [1851] [Fig 4.4] with any number of moments in Emmerich’s 2012 demonstrates that Burke’s celebrated examples of the terror sublime — “mountaintops, storms at sea, infinity and Milton’s description of Hell in the first book of Paradise Lost” [McEvilley, 2001: 63] – provides a check list of the sorts of images found in a sequence of recent eco-catastrophes that includes The Day After Tomorrow [Emmerich, 2004] and Knowing [Alex Proyas, 2009] and recent telemovies and miniseries such as Supervolcano [Tony Mitchell, 2005], Flood [Mitchell, 2007] and Superstorm [Julian Simpson, 2007]. As J.G. Ballard put it, the imagining of apocalypse is “the most mysterious forms of all categories of science fiction, and in their classic form predate modern science fiction by thousands of years.” [Ballard, 1995: 208].

Fig 4.3 Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1836. Oil on canvas,130x193cm. Collection: New York Historical Society.

Fig 4.4 John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851. Oil on canvas,196x303cm. Collection: Tate Britain.

100 In this sequence of films, we experience a secular expression of well-worn religious thematics through pre-Modernist visual language. The white void of THX 1138 however signifies another kind of representation of the sublime. It draws its considerable potency not from the literal presentation of destruction but from a kind of abstraction, a tradition that makes only an occasional appearance in mainstream SF cinema. Where does this tradition come from? And, perhaps more importantly, does this expression of the sublime reflect a type of art being made today?

Pleasure, pain, joy and anxiety

In his 1983 essay The Sublime and the Avant-Garde Jean-Francoise Lyotard theorised a sublime that could be found in the work of minimalist painter Barnett Newman. Lyotard claimed that the experience of the Romantic sublime was concerned with expressing “contradictory feeling – pleasure and pain, joy and anxiety, exaltation and depression” [Lyotard, 1991: 92] and by extension the same sensory experience could be found in images that were concerned not with mountain peaks and fiery destruction, but with the experience of colour. Further, Newman’s work suggested to Lyotard what he described as a sense of resonant ‘nowness’ - an uneasy relationship to our experience of time in art through the dissolution of figuration. An experience of the now is ultimately impossible, argued Lyotard, since it is always disappearing into the past, but it was this attempt to describe a sensation of time that lay at the heart of a what he called a ‘post modern’ sublime: “When [Newman] seeks the sublimity of the here-and-now he breaks with the eloquence of Romantic art but he does not reject its fundamental task, that of bearing pictorial witness to the inexpressible” [Lyotard, 1991: 92].

Lyotard claimed that “the stake of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to be witness to the fact that there is indeterminacy” [Lyotard, 1991: 101] and that the anxiety of not knowing what is next, if indeed there will be a next moment at all, [“is it happening?"] [Lyotard, 1991: 107] is central to a constructing a theory of a contemporary sublime. Newman’s paintings from the late 1940s were large monochromatic canvases of dark blues and reds with a single lighter line running down their centres – what the artist called “zips”. In the late 1960s Newman explored expanses of white with lighter toned white and black lines, such as his series Stations of the Cross [1959-65] [Figs 4.5, 4.6, 4.7].

101

Fig 4.5 Barnett Newman, Third Station, 1960. Oil on canvas, 198x153cm. Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

102

Fig 4.6 Barnett Newman, Fifth Station, 1962. Oil on canvas, 198x153cm. Collection: Robert & Jane Meyerhoff.

103

Fig 4.7 Barnett Newman, The Ninth Station, 1964. Acrylic on canvas, 198x152cm. Collection: Robert & Jane Meyerhoff.

104 While it might seem that abstract painting represents a radical shift in figuring the sublime, Thomas McEvilley found such a connection when he suggested that “which lies in the background of the sublime paintings such as Turner’s later works, or Gericault’s Raft of The Medusa – [suggest] that a picture of the sublime might show the entire world being torn apart. It’s only a step from that to the abstract expressionist sublime [and] the void into which one’s selfhood will supposedly dissolve” [Kelly, 2010: 202]. That void is the expanse of whiteness found in the latter works of Newman, an expression of an existential crisis of an enveloping and a consciousness-terminating nothingness, an anticipation of the technological sublime of contemporary video art.

Animation of time

It is often assumed that painting, especially the abstract non-figurative art of Minimalism represents a radically different notion of narrative to cinema. Timothy Engström’s critique of Lyotard’s postmodern sublime asks what use it has when it is separated from explicable narrative

Yes, we do have concepts of infinity, horror and excess. The question is whether we have places within our cultural narratives and/or aesthetic styles that can figure them in a way that has the desired effect. Otherwise it is difficult to understand how such unpresentables have any function or intelligible effect without narrative context being presupposed or without figural representation [Engström, 1993: 195].

Engström’s critique turns on what constitutes a meaningful “cultural narrative” [Engström, 1993: 195]. The logic of Newman’s Minimalism is understood in the context of the history of abstract painting, from the development of non-objective art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to his contemporaries and acolytes. The meaning of the individual work, and therefore its greater contextual “narrative”, is presupposed by the viewer in the gallery in the same way that a cinema audience implicitly understands the recurrent tropes of genre narrative. Narrative without a cultural context cannot exist and, although the narrative of film, or video art, is experientially different to that of painting, the greater contextual meaning and understanding of its intention is created outside the object. An explicable narrative is

105 therefore a common feature to these seemingly disparate forms because the cultural context of their meaning animates the audience’s experience.

Newman’s own writings on the sublime were an explicit engagement with the trans- historical potential of the sublime in the creation of his art, yet he was far from alone in recognizing its potential application in art making. Indeed, a recent re-deployment of a technological sublime — first suggested in the paintings of trains and railways in the work of JMW Turner — as a way of enunciating the effects of digital screen cultural objects such as video art, computer games and other screen-based art practices, is a direct historical lineage that connects the Romantics to Newman to now.

It should also be noted that Lyotard’s “post modern” is problematic. Is that designation “post modern” even meaningful? And how relevant is Lyotard’s formulation of the sublime to art being made nearly 30 years later? More troubling however is Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that the contemporary sublime is a signifier of that “demoralizing and depressing original new global space” called “late capitalism” [Jameson, 1991: 89]. Is the technological sublime embodied in contemporary video art works merely “the high-tech thematics in which the new spatial content [of globalism is]... dramatised and articulated”? [Jameson, 1991: 89]. The works we shall discuss, far from the programmatic intention of Lyotard’s ‘avant garde’ postmodern art practice, attempt to give spirit and meaning to our technological society. These works might even go some way to answer Jamieson’s assertion that “the technology of contemporary society is ... mesmerizing and fascinating, not so much in its own right, but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control ... difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp” [Jameson, 1991: 78-79].

Into the blue

Another connective line joining the films and art works that we will discuss – one that is not necessarily apparent to the viewer yet exists as a resonant field working behind the image — is an echo of a latent visuality that exists in the textual tradition of science fiction and within the digital technology used to create the effect of infinite fields. The seemingly effortless nature of the special visual effects in contemporary

106 fantasy cinema, those images created wholly within banks of computers but given incredible verisimilitude, come at the end of an evolutionary line of special effects design and production that began in the 1960s and achieved something like their contemporary form in the late 1970s. The terms “blue screen” and “green screen” refer to a technique of digital compositing known as “chroma-keying” a process involving “subtracting or making transparent a particular colour or range of colours” and are named for the “background colours used” [Kelly, 2000: 136].

As Damien Broderick notes, Star Wars [Lucas, 1977] and Close Encounters of the Third Kind [Spielberg, 1977] mark the beginnings of a new age of fantastic cinema that has subsequently enjoyed unprecedented commercial success as it has woven into familiar narratives special effects sequences unimaginable only a decade or two ago. More importantly, Broderick argues, “this [commercial] success was enabled by technical advances that finally came close to matching the immense spectacle of space travel, physical transformation, and sheer luminosity of metaphor that had always worked at a dreamlike level in classic SF” [Broderick, 2009: 44-45]. Broderick’s claim is that the visual language of contemporary science fiction films represents an implicit visuality within textual science fiction that, through the decades-long research and development that has taken us from the blue screen technologies of Star Wars and the green screen of The Matrix, to the digital realm of computer generated images. Hollywood movie studios have finally achieved what the reader could hitherto only imagine [2]. In this sense, argues Broderick, the images found in these disaster films, the sorts of sequences that make for their stunning trailers and signature moments, are literal interpretations of a Romantic pictorial tradition, yet their creation depends on the removal of one visual experience and the substitution of another via a colour that cannot be seen, an embodiment through absence, a colour of nothingness.

The resonant field: white, green and black

Barnett Newman’s white canvases are evoked in the white void in THX 1138, a narrative space that describes a disturbing absence, a vacuum into which identity and time disappear. Since the void is conceived in the film as something that has been technologically created, the sheer absence of any ‘natural’ feature suggests that nature, as we understand it, has been completely eliminated. As Jeremy Gilbert-

107 Rolfe put it, “the limitlessness of that once found in nature gives way, in technology, to a limitlessness produced out of an idea which is not interested in being an idea of nature, but one which replaces the idea of nature.” [Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999: 67]. Gilbert- Rolfe’s asserts that this technological sublime is “another idea of indeterminate limitlessness” that is “about a present rather than a potentiality.” [Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999: 68].

Figs 4.8, 4.9. THX 1138. Dir. George Lucas. American Zoetrope/Warner Bros. 1971. Film.

In THX 1138 that indeterminate limitlessness is oppressively present, but it is one that is contrasted later in scenes where THX escapes with two other prisoners from the void into an adjacent passageway so crammed with people moving and jostling that the mass of bodies is like a river- the three escapees are lost to each other as they attempt to swim against the flow [Figs 4.8, 4.9]. The extreme of endless space is

108 contrasted with the complete absence of available space. Although technology, as Gilbert-Rolfe argues, might conjure an interminable present, the potential of its opposite is always apparent.

Figs 4.10, 4.11 The Matrix. Dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski. Village Roadshow Pictures/Warner Bros. 1999. Film.

In The Matrix this oscillation between immanence and intangible vastness is played out as narrative puzzle where its characters negotiate the levels of their reality. The most curious of these is a kind of antechamber testing ground where the main character Neo is “trained’” in martial arts and weapons. It is initially depicted as a white void into which Neo and Morpheus are inserted and where all manner of scenarios can be conjured, from a simple white space made comfortable with two arm chairs and a television set, to endless racks of sub-machine guns and pistols, to a martial arts dojo [Figs 4.10, 4.11]. Without the ability to master the Matrix, the

109 imposed reality of the Machines, the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar deploy their own technological immanence as a way of overcoming another. Like Newman’s sublime abstraction, the white void in cinematic SF is a vibrant space that implies an endless, disembodied technological non-space. Far from a state of limited presence the metaphors of SF create limitless potential.

Fig 4.12 Hayden Fowler, Second Nature, 2008. Single channel, high definition digital video, 36:20, looped.

110 This oscillation between presence and absence via technological non-space has been a rich ground of inspiration for a group of artists whose work is in tune with the post modern sublime, both in subject matter, and in their making; these video installations reflexively contend with their creation, drawing out metaphors, and use science fictional themes and tropes as a way of folding back on to the viewer the same sort of self-awareness one experiences when considering the contextual narratives of minimalism.

Hayden Fowler’s Second Nature [2008], a 38-minute video installation, uses a white space as the setting for an ambiguous narrative played out between a cast of people and animals. Fowler’s previous works examined the conflicted and contradictory relationships between the human and natural worlds and Second Nature, with its humming soundtrack, air conditioning ducts and slowly shifting imagery of half- dressed figures and baleful animals, recalls the oppressive technological space of THX 1138. The narrative of the video is a series of tableaux where the ambiguous “is it happening?” of Lyotard is enacted – an enormous, partially clothed woman sits motionless watching as pink goop drops out of a pipe in a white room; the camera zooms through an air conditioning duct to another room where a rooster sits on a perch observing the rotating fan; later, a half-naked man regards a pony [Fig 4.12]. Fowler’s use of white space creates an apparent absence but it’s one that implies a greater, yet unseen, social context beyond the frame; Second Nature’s setting might be deep underground, on another planet, or on board a spacecraft. That it is designed – as seen in the white tiles and ducts - also implies that there is an intended function for this place, alluding perhaps to a dystopic future where both man and animal are genetically modified, coddled and put on show. Like the “zips” in Newman’s paintings, Fowler’s space conceptually folds and unfolds under the gaze of the viewer, revealing layers of narrative, all apparently running simultaneously, and, like the single black lines of Newman’s Stations of The Cross, the white space is schematic – outlines suggesting something unknowably larger.

This sense of the schematic in Fowler’s work has provided an equally rich metaphorical potential for Sam Smith. Smith’s video projects have explored the idea that green screen technology – and the technology of film and video production - create portals through which the viewer can literally travel in time and space. In 1961

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Fig 4.13 Sam Smith, Permutation Set, 2010. Four channel HD video, four stereo channels, 00:20 x 16,777,216 permutations.

112 Yves Klein asserted that “it is not with rockets, Sputniks and missiles that modern man will achieve the conquest of space” but that it is “human sensitivity [that is] omnipotent in immaterial reality; it can be read in the memory of nature about the past present, and the future” [Klein, 2010: 72].

In Smith’s four-screen Permutation Set the artist restaged a twenty-second, eight- shot scene from La Nuit américaine [Truffaut, 1973]. Smith deploys Klein’s notion of an omnipotent multi-time consciousness reshooting Truffaut’s scene eight times, from eight angles, transposing outdoor action to the white space of an art gallery [Fig 4.13]. Smith’s carefully re-created schematic rendering of Truffaut’s components produced a version of vast and indeterminate parts. The ‘permutation’ of the title refers to the 16,777,216 possible combinations of each shot, angle and take as Smith’s behind-the-scenes software created a permutation. The narrative of the scene, although comprehensible to the casual observer, is much like the consideration of a film from only its micro-scale components, creating in turn a puzzling non-narrative narrative.

Fig 4.14 Ms&Mr, Study for Retrograde Motion, 1988-2008. 2-channel video archived VHS rotoscoped with HDV and animation, 0:47 looped.

The collaborative art duo Ms&Mr, Richard and Stephanie Nova Milne, have, like Smith, explored the metaphor of time travel and, again like Smith, have used green screen techniques that has in the decades since Star Wars become available to low

113 budget productions. Ms&Mr’s insert themselves into their library of archive footage creating an intriguing play between present time [the time of the making of the art work] and past time [their own histories]. Familiar tropes of SF such as time travel, space travel and the now-romantic aura of Apollo era space exploration are deployed as a way of talking about their relationship to one another and to the context of their time[s].

Study for Retrograde Motion [1988-2008] [Fig 4.14] is what the artists playfully claimed was a “thought experiment in Special relativity and home movies” [MsandMr.net]. The work places the yellow-raincoat-wearing figures of the artists upon what appears to be the surface of the Moon, the adult artists interacting with the archive footage-derived images of their younger selves, the sky black and dotted with stars, the image intersected by NASA-style cross-hairs. The two-screen work plays forwards and in reverse, the disorienting effect recalling footage of astronauts on the Moon, the looping duration of the piece suggesting that time in the video work is captured, endlessly repeating. The deployment of green screen in Ms&Mr’s work is an effective means to a production end, but it also gives the imagery a ghostly “not there” quality. The mediation between present and past time is reflexively suggested by the process of the work’s making but perhaps more interestingly, the ‘look’ of green screen – that indeterminate visual field – is a startling reminder of the sublime of Newman.

Soda_Jerk, the sisters Dom and Dan Angeloro, use a kind of collage or ‘remix’ technique to make video works that are composed of pirated fragments from a vast archive of Hollywood films. The duo creates new narratives that recast the original meaning and contexts of their chosen ‘bits’ into video works that rewrite history and postulate new connections.

In the two-screen video installation After The Rainbow [2009] sequences are taken from one of the best known of all cinematic fantasizes The Wizard of Oz [Fleming, 1939] and combine it with a number of fragments from other films [3]. In After The Rainbow, the child Dorothy [Garland] meets the fortune teller Professor Marvel on the road in Kansas [Fig 4.15] and is offered a disturbing image of her own future: the actress’s adult self, broken by alcoholism and wracked with regret. Hurrying back to the family farm, Dorothy/Garland is swept up in the hurricane where, from her bed,

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Figs 4.15, 4.16 Soda_Jerk, After the Rainbow, 2009. 2-channel digital video, 5:30, looped.

115 she is again haunted by images from her future. Finally despotized over the rainbow, Dorothy emerges from the door of her family home to the edge of a stage where she sees her adult self. Horror-stricken by this image of inevitable decline, Dorothy walks backwards into her house, which is then taken back to Kansas, and where the video begins again.

Playing across two screens, After the Rainbow reflexively acknowledges its own creation through the use of manipulated footage. Although seamless in its joining of the source films, the video is marked by abrupt jump cuts and, in a sequence where Dorothy/Garland moves backwards into the house, both image and music are simply reversed. Other visual effects are more complex but brilliantly effective: in the sequence where Dorothy and Toto rush back to the family home, the hurricane/time portal bearing down, the sky is rent apart by the dissolution of the very stuff of its creation – celluloid burns out like a psychedelic supernova [Fig 4.16]. Later, when Dorothy/Garland meets her adult self, a more subtle moment is played out by the cross fading of images of both adult and child, before fading to black. After the Rainbow is indelibly marked by the pathos of mortal time – the unavoidability of one’s own death - but it also suggests that such a decline might be conjured by cosmic forces beyond our comprehension. Like the terror sublime of the eco-disaster film, the viewer’s own mortality becomes the subject of the work. But where the excess and almost comically overplayed visuals of catastrophe in Hollywood films is foregrounded by visual effects that are both literal and yet weightless - being after all nothing more than orchestrated layers of luminous pixels - the work of Soda_Jerk, Ms&Mr, Sam Smith and Hayden Fowler recast the sublime into a contemporary art practice that is as vital and urgent as the best art of the venerable past, yet free of its clichés and pre-modernist trappings.

Beyond the Infinite

Lyotard’s postmodern sublime is a way of considering and animating the practice of artists whose work picks up on many of the strands and influences of art made in the last half century. Newman’s sublime minimalism finds a contemporary resonance in video art works through their deployment of a technological absence – the technology of blue and green screen, the phantom luminosities of layered and

116 collaged imagery – offering in turn a direct challenge to the spiritual debilitations of “late capitalism”. In the imaginations of these artists, the void is a space of potential, a cogent metaphor for those networks of power so ominously suggested by Jamieson, where the technological sublime evokes not a limit, but gives form to the infinite.

Notes

1. See for example, Ann Hollander, “Watercolour; Turner, Martin”, Moving Pictures. [New York: Knopf, 1989.] 262-289, and Maurizia Natali, “The Course of Empire: Sublime Landscapes in the American Cinema” in Lefebvre, Martin, ed. Landscape and Film. [New York/London: Routledge, 2006] 91-124.

2. And, it might be added, filmmakers have now achieved the ability to animate and create in convincing detail the sorts of images once only possible through the painter’s craft.

3. The complete list of films sampled in After The Rainbow: Donnie Darko [Kelly, 2001], Easter Parade [Walters, 1948], Judy, Frank & Dean: Once in a Lifetime [Jewison, 1962], The Manson Family [Van Bebber, 2003], Meet Me in St Louis, [Minnelli, 1944], Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, [Lynch, 1992], Planet Terror [Rodriguez, 2007], Vertigo, [Hitchcock, 1958] and The Wizard of Oz [Fleming, 1939].

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The Conquest of Space The Resonances of Science Fiction Illustration, from the Hudson River to the Open Highway.

Boot Printing Lunar Dust

Ray Bradbury was one of science fiction’s most respected authors, the creator of such classics as The Martian Chronicles [1950], The Illustrated Man [1951] and Fahrenheit 451 [1953]. Bradbury, who was born in 1920 and who died in 2012, had a career that spanned the “golden age” of the genre in the 1930s, through the post-war years and the decades that followed. As an acknowledged grand master of SF he was also highly sought after as the writer of lively, opinionated forewords. Writing in Vincent di Fate’s 1997 historical compendium Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art, Bradbury recalled his encounter with minimalist painting.

Not so many years ago I visited the Hirshorn Museum in Washington D.C. and then opened the pages of vivid work before you. The contrast was and is devastating. In the Hirshorn, guards riveted by ennui were pairing their nails and staring at their shoes. The walls around them offered no surcease with their non-decorative, non-descriptive, non-metaphorical coloured swatches and bleak ribbons of art. The walls were in effect empty. The canvases were blank fields where no crops grew, no seeds fell to propagate, no ideas waited for a reviving rain. Not so much as some corn-or-wheatfield stubble in all that vacuum. The guards had long since fidgeted themselves into suspended animation [Bradbury, 1997:6].

Bradbury found little inspiration in the paintings on show at the Hirshorn, a museum that holds in its collection examples of work by Marc Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Kenneth Noland and Jackson Pollock among others. Although Bradbury does not name the artists whose work he had seen those “blank fields” and “bleak ribbons” might well

118 have been paintings by Barnett Newman, whose work is also held by the Hirshorn. Where Jean-Francois Lyotard had found sublimity in the vast depths of Newman’s monochromes and unfolding conceptual picture spaces behind their zips – Bradbury saw nothing more than surface. With little patience for high modernism, Bradbury preferred the illustrative expertise of artists such as Gustave Doré and William Hogarth and illustrators such as J. J. Grandville. He also admired the pop culture accessibility of comic strips such as The Wizard of Id and The Far Side. Bradbury saw modern art as essentially useless, offering not inspiration but debilitation.

In the history of movers and shakers, the greatest, most beautiful artists rarely ran out in the gutters or fell into Space via the nearest pub. Science Fiction is true people’s art. It shook and moved them. Rembrandt and Turner and Braque and Renoir moved the hearts. But Paul, Wesso … and Bonestell moved the bodies. Those bodies circle Earth tonight and will make the grand finale shift to Moon and Mars in just a few years [Bradbury, 1997: 8].

Bradbury made some bold claims. He conflated the history of high Western art with the pop culture of mid to late 20th century America finding the egalitarian inspiration missing in Minimalism. While the venerable author fretted for the boredom of museum guards he extolled the ability of science fiction illustration [SFI] to shape history itself.

It was these [sorts of] images, homely, sometimes trite, ugly, often beautiful, that changed the world. More than the vertiginous assaults of wildman Picasso, [science fiction illustration] caused boys to rise up as men and those men to rise further to boot-print lunar dust [Bradbury, 1997: 6].

While Bradbury considered SFI to be an exceptional genre of visual art that mixes high art heritage with the appeal of popular culture — and which inspires men and women to perform great deeds of exploration — it is was an ahistorical view that separated the role of art from its wider cultural context. SFI figures technology with the human form, it mixes the icons of the genre such as the rocket ship and the alien with the tradition of the classical landscape and the experimentation of Modernism. But where do the images of SFI come from? And what do they say about their time, their context and connections to conceptions of modernity and the future? To answer

119 these questions this chapter considers SFI and its links to a history of art, looking back beyond the beginnings of the modern era to the Renaissance, then to theories of the sublime as they were popularly interpreted in the 19th and 20th centuries, and then to consider the cultural resonances of military technology such as the missile and the highway with the styling of brand advertisements for contemporary consumer technologies.

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Figs 4.17 Astounding Science Fiction, Jan. 1958. 4.18 Fantastic Story, ND.

121

Figs 4.19 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct.1958 4.20 Astounding SF. Oct. 1953.

122

Figs 4.21 Astounding SF, June 1951. 4.22 SF Quarterly May, 1954.

123

SFI: A Speculative History

SFI’s signature images are invariably realist in nature, trading on traditions of representational figuration and landscape painting for their mimetic effects. SFI images typically combine fantastic elements such as monumental contrasts in scale featuring spacecraft and space suited explorers [Fig 4.17]; improbable points of view such as placing the viewer in deep space or on the surface of an artificial satellite [Fig 4.18]; elements of the exotic with alien creatures and environments [Fig 4.19]; and suggestions of the uncanny in images of robots, computers and other inhuman figures [Fig 4.20]. SFI images might also combine many of these elements together, either within the one picture, or as a montage of separate elements [Fig 4.21]. The perennial favourite of the Pulp Era – scantily clad women in sublimated sexual encounters – are well represented [Fig 4.22]. Expressive, abstract or other non- realist elements are largely avoided in favour of a visually arresting realist style that suggests a moment rich in narrative suggestion.

Although the features of SFI can be identified its history is more problematic. Numerous authors have described a lineage that reaches back beyond the formulation of specific genre characteristics for SFI’s historical precedents. Vincent di Fate argues that 15th century artist Hieronymus Bosch [1450-1516] made work that anticipates SFI citing his Garden of Earthly Delights [1490-1510], [Fig 4.23] which depicted a bizarre and incongruous scene of monsters, men and angels, lost in a chaotic landscape. Di Fate also cites Leonardo da Vinci [1452-1510] as a precursor since the sketches in his notebooks were “extrapolated plans for submersible ships, tanks, flying machines” that, although not science fiction by a contemporary definition, they were “far beyond the science of their time” [di Fate, 1999:18]. David Hardy makes a similar case for Bosch and da Vinci, while also citing Giovanni Batista Piranesi [1720-1778], Paul Gustave Doré [1832-1883] and Odilon Redon [1840- 1916] for their illustrative styles, while adding 20th century Surrealists Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, M.C. Escher and unspecified “others” to the mix [Hardy, 1978: 124].

124

Fig 4.23 Hieronymus Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights [detail]. Oil on panel triptych, 220x389 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Fig 4.24 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe. Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor) painted as Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons, c.1590-1. Oil on wood, 68x56 cm. Skoklosters Slott, Bålsta, Sweden.

125 Ron Miller gathers together another line up of artists including 19th century French illustrator/artists Emile Baynard, A. de Nueville and P. Phillipoteaux – who created images to accompany the publication of stories by Jules Verne – and adding Lucien Redaux, an astronomer and illustrator [Miller, 1996: 141-142]. Anthony Frewin reaches back to Bosch and to Albrecht Dürer [1471-1528] for his starting points and includes later artists such as 19th century English painter John Martin, and French artist/illustrators such as Grandville and Albert Robida [Frewin, 1974: 10].

This common pre-history of SFI tends toward artists working in a realist, figurative mode that corralles together their work regardless of time, context or purpose, concentrating on the representation of fantastic scenes as plausible realties. The inclusion of 20th century Surrealists within the history of science fiction is itself problematic, and as we have we have discussed in previous chapters, a rather loose fit within the realm of the science fictional. But the history of SFI begins to gain some coherence in the late 19th century, the period in which the work of writers such as Verne, Edgar Allen Poe and H.G. Welles were appearing in mass circulation magazines in France, America and England, and which were accompanied by illustrations. The 1880s was the dawning of the “pulp era” of magazine publication, cheap mass circulation titles, which in turn gave birth to modern genre fiction, such as adventure romance, detective fiction, the western and, in the 1920s, science fiction.

The impresario publisher Hugo Gernsback, the man who would give science fiction its name, was born in 1884. Throughout his career Gernsback published or edited dozens of genre magazines including many SF titles and was as much responsible for the foundation of modern SFI as he was for creating the genre of modern SF itself. Gernsback dictated illustration styles and methods that would determine the look and style of the images that accompanied the stories in his magazines. The decades from the 1930s through to the 1950s – the “golden age” of SF - saw the establishment of popular magazines such as Amazing Stories [est. 1926] Astounding Stories [later Analog] [est. 1930] The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [est. 1949] and Galaxy Science Fiction [est. 1950]. The Golden Age is the period in which SFI became an identifiable and commercially successful genre in its own right and it’s work from this period that tends to form the corpus of SFI’s official history.

126 This commonly accepted history of SFI narrows its field of precursors so radically that an examination of its claims reveals a speculative history marked by contradictions and willful exclusions. The argument that Bosch is a logical starting point makes sense when one considers the subject of Garden of Earthly Delights (in part a reaction to the threat to Natural Law posed by early Renaissance technologies [di Fate, 1999: 17]) yet it is a highly selective view that ignores the rest of the painting to concentrate on aspects of just one section of its three panels. This view of SFI history also excludes artists such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo [1527-1593] whose Vertumnus, a portrait of today [1590-1] [Fig 4.24] - a fantasy portrait of Rudolph II as if made up entirely of fruit and vegetables - fits the literal interpretation of SFI. The work of illustrators such as Doré and Piranesi also seem like apposite examples in both technique and subject – the mythological fantasies and Biblical scenes of Doré and the images of ancient ruins by Piranesi rendered in realist style – but again the specific contexts of those artists are largely left unexamined to concentrate on a literal figuration of the fantastic.

The artists and commercial illustrators who produced images to accompany stories such as Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun [1687] Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels [1735] Louis Guillaume de la Folie’s The Philosopher without pretension, or the rare man, [1775] or Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Underground Journey [1789] gave visual form to a host of narratives encompassing satirical, parodic or adventure yarns set in imaginary worlds. But to say that all these stories are ‘science fiction’ by contemporary definition, largely ignores the greater narrative of the growth of a technological society that formed the background for these writers and artists. As Brian Aldiss has pointed out, this problematic history has much to do with the changing nature of SFI.

The historical function of art in SF has been to illustrate rather than interpret. This reflects the hard-edged nature of early genre SF itself, which portrayed technics-dominated society rather than interpreting its raison d’étre. When these functional attitudes weakened SF illustration became freer, aspiring to illumination rather than diagram. Today their relationship to text is often generic rather than specific [Aldiss, 1999: 613].

127 Aldiss makes a crucial distinction between early SFI and its later formulation as a signifier of the genre itself. Why this is so, and how it came about, is the next step in our investigation.

Decoding Space

Much of the writing on SFI has been the domain of general market, ‘lavishly illustrated’ tomes aimed at science fiction fans with an interest in artists who developed and elaborated the genre’s signature visual style, texts that rarely attempt to interpret the artist’s work beyond describing the techniques employed to achieve the image – oil paints, airbrushes, computer modeling etc. Some critics however have sought to analyse the operation of SFI in terms of both history and affect. George Slusser’s The Iconology of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art argues that the historical development of SFI as a distinct genre is closely linked with the developments of non-genre or ‘mainstream’ art. Slusser states that the canonical history of visual art is centred on artists, schools and movements and that “value is placed on ‘genius’ – the idiosyncratic or ‘original’ – rather than the normative or collaborative vision” [Slusser, 2002: 9].

By contrast, SFI’s “force” comes not from its much vaunted ability to conjure new worlds of “things never before seen” but “from its ability to substitute old worlds for new – to reconnect the visually new but devitalized images of modern art the collective myth that unites all ages of human endeavor, to bring forth the basic icons of human visual experience from the formal debris of cubism, surrealism, and other schools of art” [Slusser, 2002: 9]. Slusser’s argument suggests that SFI appropriates source material and iconography from art history’s various movements and, with an emphasis on the communal nature of the science fiction audience, restores art’s value as a form of communication. As we shall see, this relationship between SFI artist and an audience is acute, but Slusser also claims that, for whatever style an artist might adopt, it is the inclusion of the human figure in SFI that guarantees its value against abstraction and other apparently inhuman forms of art. Slusser’s contentious claim that there is a viable canonical history of art in the 21st century, and that ‘genius’ is valued above all else is, however, highly problematic.

128 Gary Westfahl’s Artists in Wonderland: Toward a True History of Science Fiction traces the history of SFI with an emphasis on the close relationship between magazine publishing, SFI artists and the strict requirements of defining a genre, from the Pulp Era to the 1980s. Each decade is defined by a sequence of identifiable visual styles each in turn closely related to the kinds of science fiction being published; the 1920s was “Futurist SF Art” with an emphasis on “huge buildings, cities and geometric symmetries”; the 1930s, the Pulp Era, is associated with the “human figure, heroes, sexy women and monsters”; the 1940s was exemplified by “Space Art” with alien landscapes and space exploration; the 1950s was “Slick SF Art” with realism and a “variety of subject matter” and “ambiguity”; the 1960s was the decade of “Abstract SF Art” with “semi-abstract or entirely abstract images”; and the 1980s the age of “Surreal SF Art” typified by “real objects combined in an unreal manner” [Westfahl, 2002: 33]. Westfahl omits the 1970s completely on the grounds that very little happened – in print, SF was consolidating the after effects of the New Wave and experiencing a nostalgic appreciation for Hard SF, while at the cinema Star Wars, Star Trek “and so on” were released [Westfahl, 2002: 21]. While Westfahl’s chart of SF styles and defining characteristics over the decades is [he admits] ad hoc, it is also vague and imprecise with its descriptions – the author opting for some somewhat overheated prose to describe imagery – while adopting a completely America-centric view ignoring some spectacular developments in SFI in the UK and France during the 1970s.

Although both Westfahl and Slusser sketch a history of SFI neither is able to analyse how an SFI image actually works – the nuts and bolts of its perceptual apparatus, the thing that somehow, perhaps invisibly, connects the work of SFI artists to that grand history of canonical art. J.E. Svilpis’s essay Science Fiction Illustration: A Semiotic Analysis argues that SFI operates in two distinct modes.

[An] illustration may be illustrative in two different senses, whether actually referring to story or not. It may function [in the manner of] a frame of a film or comic book version of a narrative, iconicizing one instant of one episode in the story. … On the other hand, it may eliminate the traces from which a narrative may be reconstructed, and may instead provide a statement of some general quality of the story, of the magazine, or of SF and/or fantasy in general. In some degree, all cover illustrations may be read as generic

129 statements at all three levels: (1) as representations of stories either actual or potential; (2) as characterization of the magazines of which they from a part and (3) as discourses about the nature of the genre(s) to which they belong [Svilpis, 1983:281].

Svilpis’s claim is that SFI is mimetic but is also ideographic and emblematic – each image encoded with layered meaning and reference that conflates and complicates a reading of SFI’s mimetic processes and properties while achieving estrangement in the Suvinian sense. An audience familiar with SFI implicitly understands its codes and styles, recognizing in the context of its presentation that images can be used generically – or they might equally refer to a specific moment in a story.

Mimetic narrative illustrations yield easily to this interpretive activity, while mimetic symbolic ones require two stages of interpretation – first an iconographic or allegorical reading of the symbol, then contextualization within an under-determined and therefore abstract narrative. Ideographic illustrations extend this two-stage interpretation by insisting on an allegorization, foregrounding this aspect of the interpretive activity by their synecdochic dismemberments and metonymic juxtapositions [Svilpis, 1983: 281].

Svilpis argues that there is a complex feedback mechanism between SFI, its context and its audience, the audience shaping the creation of SFI imagery by a response to those images through the purchase of one magazine or paperback over another. Thus, the audience, the editor/publisher and the commissioned artist are intimately connected. By using Pulp Era magazine covers as the subject of his analysis, and by charting the ways in which key visual icons of SF such as the rocket ship were repeatedly used, Svilpis demonstrates that SFI caters to an audience with an instinctual understanding of its shifting meanings and contextual operations [Svilpis, 1983: 281-289]. The generic image discreetly shifts between, and conflates, metonym, synecdoche, allegory and metaphor. Just as genres of fine art painting such as the portrait, the landscape or the still life are about the thing that is depicted – the person, the picturesque view, or the bowl of fruit — individual paintings are also “about” the genres themselves, each component of the individual painting in dialogue with the history of the genre.

130

The rocket ship in classic SFI is to science fiction what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris, an object with a long history behind its making yet it is also a symbol that stands in for the entirety of a culture. Svilpis’s analysis offers us an insight into the way SFI operates yet he does not fully explain why a real object might operate in the same way as a wholly invented one. In his analysis of the rocket ship Svilpis examines a number of classic science fiction magazine covers from 1951 through to 1970. Of the 12 magazine covers under analysis Svilpis includes the January 1970 cover of Analog magazine featuring not a painting or drawing – as in all the other examples – but a photo of a Saturn V rocket blasting off during an Apollo mission. In this one instant fictional space and real space collapse offering a wider historical view of the science fictional imaginary.

Outer Spaces

One of the most celebrated of all SF artists is Chesley Bonestell [1888-1986]. Bonestell studied architecture and worked for a number of San Francisco-based firms as an illustrator who produced artist’s impressions for various building projects and contributing designs for the Golden Gate Bridge. In 1938, at the age of 50, Bonestell began to work in Hollywood creating glass, matte and background paintings for films including Citizen Kane [Welles, 1941], The Fountainhead [Vidor, 1949], Destination Moon [Pichel, 1950], War of the Worlds [Haskin, 1953] and The Conquest of Space [Haskin, 1955]. Bonestell was also a prolific creator of space images for print, painting then-scientifically accurate depictions of planets in the solar system, such as his much-celebrated series of images of Saturn as it might have seen from the surface of Titan, a sequence published in Life magazine in 1944 [Fig 4.25]. Many of his paintings were reproduced on the covers of science fiction magazines including a dozen cover images for Astounding Science Fiction and 38 cover images for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [Grant & Nicholls, 1999: 143].

131

Fig 4.25 Chesley Bonestell, Saturn As Seen From The Surface of Titan, 1944. Oil on board, 41x51cm. Collection: Adler Planetarium, Chicago.

Fig 4.26 Chesley Bonestell, Assembling the Mars Expedition, 1950. Oil on board, 53x94cm. Private Collection.

132 Bonestell’s work was notable for its technique. Whereas other illustrators of the period had hard-edged graphic styles suitable for reproduction in pulp magazines – and on occasion he produced images in this manner – Bonestell’s key work was painted in oils with glazing to produce a smooth, finished surface. Bonestell’s paintings had the aura of the old masters and the pictorial authority of photography.

His style was photographic realism, showing great attention to correctness of perspective and scale in conformity with scientific knowledge of the day, and some of his Moon pictures, for example, were truly prophetic in their accuracy. But, more than that, his work held great beauty and drama in its stillness and depth [Grant & Nicholls, 1999: 143].

That his work was of sights as-yet-unseen, and therefore largely unverifiable, was of little consequence to the mass audience who saw his striking images in magazines and films; these were works that had great emotional resonance for a public primed for the coming space race. Such was Bonestell’s artistic authority that he was enlisted to illustrate The Conquest of Space [1949], a book by the journalist and space enthusiast Willy Ley.

Born in Germany in 1906 and emigrating to the US in 1935, Ley was an energetic proselytizer of space exploration and in his lifetime became a name practically synonymous with the space race itself. Aside from writing articles and books on an array of subjects [space exploration, paleontology, astronomy and cryptozoology], Ley was also a technical advisor on the SF television series Tom Corbett, Space Cadet [1951-55], and the designer of passenger rockets for plastic model companies [N.A., Astronautix.com]. Bonestell, who shared credit with Ley as co-author for The Conquest of Space, was an artist whose images were a fitting accompaniment to Ley’s speculative dreams of the exploration and colonization of the Moon, Mars and worlds beyond. Bonestell’s images weren’t couched as a plausible fantasy, but as tantalizing yet-to-be-proven scientific fact. The illustrator of a further nine books on space, space exploration and astronomy – including Arthur C. Clarke’s The Exploration of The Moon [1954] — Bonestell also contributed to what would become highly influential space images for a series of articles for Collier’s Magazine in the early 1950s [Miller, 1996: 141].

133 According to Bonestell’s biographer Ron Miller, the period from the mid-1940s saw the American public on a “technology high” – entranced by the sublime wonder of the world-changing technologies unleashed during the war – and Bonestell was part of that heightened cultural moment.

Space flight symbolized everything the postwar world promised, and it seemed as if it were just around the corner. Magazines, books, television and motion pictures that featured anything about space travel became best sellers, and it seemed that Bonestell was contributing something to them all. So pervasive was his art that he shaped the very thinking of both layperson and scientist as to what spacecraft were expected to look like [Miller, 1996: 142].

Bonestell’s work ranged across a number of recurring subjects: space vehicles in various degrees of readiness, from the launch pad to outer space to landing on the Moon, or other planets; scenes of space exploration staging, such as his paintings of arrays of spaceships, tenders and other vehicles in planetary orbit; speculative landscapes of the surfaces of other planets, such as his Saturn series, to far flung vistas on Jupiter, Pluto, or even the surface of a planet being consumed by a super nova. Occasionally, as a commercial illustrator, Bonestell was also responsible for speculative scenes closer to home, such as his images of New York destroyed by an atomic bomb, or the end of the world in the far distant future.

Bonestell’s Assembling The Mars Expedition, 1950 [Fig 4.26], an image from the Colliers Magazine series shows, at right, a fleet of fuelling ships and, at left, an interplanetary rocket. In the middle ground is a spoked, wheel-like space station and below is the Earth featuring the southern Mexican coast. The most striking aspect of this painting is the use of chiaroscuro lighting effects. The picture takes in the Earth’s curvature from nightside to dayside, the mid-point of this graduation falling at almost exactly the middle of the picture. Not only does this dynamic lighting effect encourage the eye to move back and forth across the image, it also acts as a dramatic backdrop to the blue and grey of the tender ships — and to the striking red wings of the rocket marked with a bold “1”.

134

Fig 4.27 Chesley Bonestell, Baby Satellite, 1956. Oil on board, 51x63cm. Private Collection.

Although small details in the picture such as the four space suited astronauts at left, and at far right, the moon and its reflection, are visual devices that excite the eye, much of the painting is schematic. The surface of the Earth is only lightly detailed, much like the surface of a desk globe or an atlas, and perspective is forced by the

135

Fig 4.28 Chesley Bonestell, Exploring The Moon By Earthlight, 1961. Oil on board, 36x36cm. Private Collection.

Fig 4.29 Chesley Bonestell, The Surface of Venus, 1949. Oil on board, dimensions unknown. Private Collection.

136 arrangement of fuelling ships. A similar lack of detail and a flattening effect can be seen in Baby Satellite from the book The Exploration of Mars, 1956 [Fig 4.27]. The painting’s dynamic quality is again found in the hard-edged lighting effects, the bands of fire engine red against black and the sense of great depth to the image. For all of Bonestell’s much vaunted scientific accuracy as an illustrator he relied on simple but effective contrasts in colour, tone and scale. For paintings set in space where there are few natural atmospheric effects – such as diffusion, haze and changes in colour to create a sense of distance – Bonestell stuck doggedly to his formula. For paintings that were to depict planetary surfaces where there is no atmosphere, such as those on the Moon, Bonestell used scale effectively. His Exploring The Moon by Earthlight from the book Man on The Moon, 1961[Fig 4.28], contains a number of classic Bonestellian features; the foreground of the image at right is a large, craggy mountain up which four astronauts climb, while the left hand side reveals an expansive moonscape. The placing of craters and ridges at close, middle and far grounds — as well as a horizon line of mountain peaks - create a dramatic sense of distance. The Moon’s surface is riven with cracks, ravines and what appear to be the remnant markings of lava flows. In the sky, a white circle is the Earth and a slash of white dots the Milky Way.

For planetary landscapes — alien and Earthbound – Bonestell could resort to the well-worn techniques of classical landscape painting to create arresting images. The Surface of Venus from the Conquest of Space series painted in 1949 [Fig 4.29] is an entirely speculative image of the planet’s surface: a sea of dunes is framed at left and right by rocky outcrops worn smooth by millennia of dust storms. The sky is similarly framed by dust clouds revealing, at the centre of the picture, an oval shape where a graduated scale of colour suggests an obscured sun. Bonestell’s The End of The World as The Sun Becomes Nova from the book The World We Live In [1955] [Fig 4.30] is again composed around the central point of the giant sun, mountain ranges providing a sense of scale and distance to rivers of lava below, the sky red and laced in cataclysmic clouds. His 1964 picture A Nova Is Beginning to Melt The Mountains of A Hypothetical Planet [from Beyond the Solar System] [Fig 4.31] is centered on a brilliant white sun that creates striking “fingers of God” streams of light. The image is framed at right by a rock face that stretches from bottom to roughly the middle of the image, while on the left, sun, mountains and lava flows are framed by billowing clouds, each “frame” drawing the viewer’s eye to the centre.

137

Fig 4.30 Chesley Bonestell, The End of The World As The Sun Becomes Nova [detail], 1955. Oil on board, 58x86cm. Private Collection.

138

Fig 4.31 Chesley Bonestell, A Nova Is Beginning To Melt The Mountains of a Hypothetical Planet, 1964. Oil on board, 41x51cm. Private Collection.

139 Although nominally of possible scenes and events, Bonestell’s space images operate, as Svilpis argues, in both mimetic and symbolic modes. Their reliance on repetitive compositions, traditional realist landscape compositional techniques, and stark contrasts, are virtual, subliminal aspects of the work. Considering the context in which they were seen – in mass circulation magazines – Bonestell’s images act as symbol of the collective wish that these images are literally seeable. Their figuration in a realist language tends to elide this symbolic function and obfuscate their schematic details and other aspects where realism is sacrificed in favor of effect. Although Bonestell himself denied that his work was science fiction – despite the fact that dozens of his paintings were used on the covers of SF magazines and he was awarded a Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist in 1968 given by the World Science Fiction Society – his paintings are undeniably science fictional in this respect. It is only one step on from the speculative images of Bonestell to the use of images of real spacecraft on the covers of SF magazines.

Bonestell’s paintings weren’t so much concerned with depicting the mechanics of actual space travel — since at the time of painting this was all pure speculation — as they were in giving his images the patina of realism. In retrospect we know that little of what he had painted came to pass, either in detail, or in the grander sweep of the ambitious space exploration plans of the period, yet Bonestell’s work had a mimetic value that could convince the casual viewer that the image was both plausible and possible. Bonestell, as we shall see, drew on the precedent of American landscape painting to create ‘convincing’ off world vistas and space scenes.

In the first century A.D., Longinus argued that rhetoric, when properly structured and presented by a skilled poet, could produce the effect of sublimity in an audience. “A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself — to believe or not is usually in our own power — but the Sublime, acting with an imperious and irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or no” [Longinus, 1: 1.4]. Longinus further claimed that sublimity itself was cumulative, as special effects and poetic flourishes gathered for a moment of transcendence. Longinus offers the reader such a moment with a powerful analogy: “Skill in invention, lucid arrangement and disposition of facts … gradually manifest

140 themselves in the general structure of a work; but a sublime thought, if happily timed, illumines an entire subject with the vividness of a lightning-flash” [Longinus, 1:1.4]. When Bonestell and other SFI artists — and writers like Bradbury — reject Modernism in visual art, they are appealing to the instinctual historical logic of the ancient sublime, the lightening flash of rightness that accompanied that moment when America’s ‘manifest destiny’ seemed to be heading toward the stars.

A Simpler Past

Wyn Wachhorst, writing in The Massachusetts Review in 1995, nostalgically recalled his childhood encounter with Bonestell’s paintings in Life magazine, published May 29th, 1944. For Wachhorst this was a revelatory experience, evoking an ecstatic sense of possibility that connected the bucolic landscapes of his boyhood holidays on the coast of California with the dream of encountering a view of Saturn from the surface of Titan.

The giant Saturn looms in the dark blue, an alien ship, a thin gleaming crescent bisected by the glowing edge of its rings, afloat between jagged cliffs that jut from a frozen sea. Warmed by the distant sub, the rocky cliffs and scarps rise sheer into the cobalt sky, casting a cold, dark shadow on the icy sea. There is an eerie beauty in the incongruity of unearthly light. One feels a storm has passed on a late November afternoon, yet the sky is specked with stars and a hint of dawn lights the far horizon [Wachhorst, 1995:12].

This image was in stark contrast to others found elsewhere in the magazine — “soldiers napping in foxholes amid the rubble of Italy, the American boys with their English girls in London’s Hyde Park, awaiting the invasion of France” [Wachhorst, 1995:8]. Yet there was cause for hope, the tide of war had turned, and the end of the conflict in Europe was in sight. As with many cultures experiencing an existential threat, nostalgia was at a premium as the popular imagination turned inwards. “One sensed it in the record success of Oklahoma! – with its aura of youth, hope, and new beginnings, and in the spate of plays and novels set in the sunnier days of turn-of- the-century – America’s … new optimism sought the simpler past within a wondrous future” [Wachhorst, 1995:12].

141 Part of this renewed appreciation for the American past was a critical and popular reassessment of the Hudson River School [HRS], a group of artists who, from the early to mid 19th century, produced a sequence of paintings that valorized American wilderness landscapes. This so-called ‘school’ had been named retrospectively around 1879 by critics attempting to describe what was then considered an anomalous period in American art. In the late 19th century, as European-trained American artists returned home, the first bracing changes of Modernism began to be felt, and the legacy of the HRS began to lose its lustre [Avery, 1987: 4].

In the early 20th century, after decades of critical neglect, HRS painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederic E. Church, Albert Bierstadt and Jasper C. Cropsey, were reappraised in a series of major exhibitions: A Century of American Landscape Painting at the Whitney Museum in 1938, Romantic Painting in America in 1943 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Hudson River School and the Early American Landscape Tradition at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum in early 1945 [Avery, 1987: 13]. Alongside these exhibitions were a number of books, journal articles, magazine and newspaper stories that gave these shows - and the debate on the relevance of the HRS to American art — a new audience. The author Wolfgang Born writing in American Landscape Painting: An Interpretation [1948] saw the HRS artists and their work as the most original art of its time and a genuine American expression, and crucially, the HRS expressed a unique sense of “space feeling” [Avery, 1987: 14].

The HRS had a distinct and often idiosyncratic approach to landscape painting, exploring its potential for evoking space, time, and even a sense of the future. The links between the American tradition of the frontier and the formulation of the genre of science fiction has been explored [Ben-Tov, 1998; Westfahl, 2000 et al] yet the connections between 19th century American landscape painting and SFI is largely uncharted territory.

The Ruins of Nature

For much of the 19th century America experienced a period of rapid growth and social upheaval. From 1830 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 – and through the years of Reconstruction that followed – America’s social and political establishments

142 were under attack. Sarah Burns argues that virtually ever facet of American society faced unprecedented change “from a burgeoning market economy and industrialization, slavery and abolition, immigration, urban growth, the emergent working class, financial crises, and sectional strife generated tremendous unease and misgivings about the nation’s future” [Burns, 2004: 21].

Alongside these social changes there was a profound sense of uncertainty when it came to an American artistic identity. Aesthetic theories, especially those related to landscape painting, were dominated by English and European thinkers – American artists were educated in ideas about the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime through English writers such as William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight [Kornhauser, 2007: 14]. Their painterly pictorial styles spoke of an array of influences, from contemporaneous English painters John Martin and JMW Turner to the Italian Baroque artist Salvatore Rosa [1615-1673] and French landscape master Claude [Claude Lorrain, 1621-1682], [Fluck, 1997: 94]. There was however one feature unique to America and to HRS painting that everyone – citizen and foreigner alike – could agree upon: its landscape.

As a new nation attempting to define itself, America celebrated in its art the novelties of its landscape – its scale, freshness and variety. The wilderness, which had been feared and loathed in the eighteenth century, was now viewed as America’s most distinctive feature – a symbol of the nation’s potential as well as its history. In the absence of cultural history so celebrated in European art, educated tourists sought spiritual renewal in the ruins of nature and monuments of their own sublime wilderness scenery [Kornhauser, 2007: 15].

Increased mobility allowed artists to travel more freely across the American landscape, by boat, coach and horse, and later, by train. Areas of wilderness close to America’s largest East Coast cities were opening up to tourism and those with a taste for the majesty of mountain scenes, waterfalls, forests and other natural wonders, could make their way in increasing comfort to previously inaccessible or dangerous regions [Kornhauser, 2007:15]. Avery notes that in 1824 a tourist hotel had opened in the Catskills 100 miles from New York City [Avery, 2004: Met]. A year later in 1825 a young English-born artist named Thomas Cole set sail up the Hudson River for the

143 Catskills hotel, making sketches along the banks of the river as he went. From these sketches Cole made paintings that proved highly popular and, as Avery records “gained him widespread commissions and almost instant fame” and which helped to “welcome him into the larger cultural life of the city, and [Cole] was befriended especially by William Cullen Bryant, the poet and newspaper editor, who wrote a sonnet to Cole when he departed on a Grand Tour of Europe in 1829” [Avery, 2004: Met].

The painters of the HRS sought to apply theories of the sublime to the American landscape and although their retrospective naming implies a distinct geographical association, paintings of the Hudson River form but one part of their oeuvre. Cole painted pictures of the Hudson River early in his career but, after trips to Europe, created scenes in keeping with the subjects and themes of his influences. Cole also produced scenes from the Bible and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and ambitious multi-picture series such as the five-part The Course of Empire [1833-36] and the four-part The Voyage of Life [1842]. While these allegorical paintings “owed a clear debt” to works by Turner such as his Dido Building Carthage [1815] [Venning, 2003; 208] Cole’s pictures had no referent to actual historical events. They were instead imaginative concoctions that gave form to the widely held assumption that civilization was cyclical, rising from savagery through an Arcadian era to a Golden Age, followed by inevitable decline.

Frederic E. Church made trips to Niagara Falls via the Hudson River and the Erie Canal to find suitably majestic subject matter. Church later travelled to South America where he painted smoking volcanoes, rain soaked mountain ranges, stupendous waterfalls and, after a trip to the Arctic Circle, ice fields and icebergs. Alfred Bierstadt went west, producing monumental canvases of Yosemite Valley – such as Sunset in the Yosemite Valley [1868] [Fig 4.32] - the Rocky Mountains and Puget Sound. Other artists commonly associated with the HRS such as Fitz Hugh Lane [1804-1865], Martin Johnson Heade [1819-1904] and Jasper Francis Cropsey [1823-1900] produced small-scale paintings of Hudson River scenes, however, their subjects, styles and themes could be just as varied. Although these artists produced celebrated paintings that were intimate in scale, featured modest subject matter and had a distinctive use of light — which rewarded them another retrospective

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Fig 4.32 Albert Bierstadt, Sunset in The Yosemite, 1868. Oil on board, 91x132cm. Collection: Haggin Museum, Stockton, California.

categorisation as “Luminists” – they were also highly eclectic in both style and theme across the course of their careers; Cropsey, for instance, produced two huge paintings depicting classical ruins in homage to Cole [Wilton, 2002: 112], in contrast to the quietude of his Luminist landscapes.

The HRS’s interpretation of what constituted the sublime was equally eclectic. Fluck argues that the “sublime” found in HRS painting was “neither consistently sublime, nor consistently beautiful or picturesque, but all of the above and in all kinds of combination, including frequent borrowings of different compositional patterns, and diverse intertextual allusions” [Fluck, 1997: 94]. Barbara Novak notes that HRS painting was the result of a concatenation of cultural influences and often- contradictory theories of the sublime that shifted the quality of sublimity from the object – as argued by Longinus and Burke – to the subject – the sublime of Kant. The HRS found inspiration in classical landscape painting and a tradition of Romantic-Gothic imagination. These ideas, writes Novak were “nourished, first, by the uncultivated wilderness of the East, then by the penetration of the majestic western territories.” The sublime qualities of this school of painting “can be

145 recognised in the more ambitious works … which drew on the conventions of Claude and on the moods of Salvator” while the “active energy and noisy cataclysm of Church’s adventures in South America” related to older concepts of sublimity [Novak, 1980: 30].

Fig 4.33 Thomas Cole, The Architect’s Dream, 1840. Oil on canvas, 134x213cm. Collection: Toledo Museum of Art.

HRS painters were well noted for their habit of altering or editing their source material. Cole’s Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund [1827] depicting a scene from Fenimore Cooper’s novel, or The Architect’s Dream [1840] [Fig 4.33] – “an assemblage of structures, Egyptian, Gothic, Grecian, Moorish, such as might present itself to the imagination of one who had fallen asleep after reading a work on the different styles of architecture" [Noble, 1997: 213] – owed little to the recording of actual landscapes as they did to a collaging of various elements for dramatic effect.

Church, who visited Niagara Falls a number of times during the mid-1850s, sketched and painted various scenes in preparation for a large picture. Ultimately Church altered perspective to fit his composition ending with a point of view that could only have been achieved if the “viewer” was somewhere over the water itself, an “unmediated encounter with Niagara’s tremendous energy, giving the viewer the

146 disorienting sensation of teetering on the water’s edge – a sublime experience executed to perfection” [Davidson, 2006:13]. Church removed from view any signs of human presence such as bridges, buildings or any of the estimated 60,000 tourists who flocked to the Falls each year in the mid-19th century [Davidson, 2006:7] to enhance his already nominally “natural” view. Church’s Cotopaxi [1862] [Fig 4.34] is a collage of elements, compressing 80 kilometers of flat plain into the bottom half of the picture, complete with fissures and a lake, the top half of the picture containing a snow covered volcano, a billowing smoke cloud and a partially obscured, livid sun – details “conceived on a scale that contributes to the power of the whole design, subordinated as they are to a highly original and daring compositional plan” [Wilton, 2002: 220].

Fig 4.34 Frederic Church, Cotopaxi, 1862. Oil on canvas, 307x546cm. Collection: Detroit Institute of Arts, Chicago.

The artists of the HRS also produced images that were scientifically speculative. Cole’s images of cities in ruins, such as his The Course of Empire sequence, imagined destruction as an inevitable outcome of classical civilization, his painting an allegory for the ruin of Western democracy, but he also included details within his works that spoke of geological time as 19th century scientists envisioned it. Abraham Gottlieb Werner’s assertion that the world had been covered in a single ocean – in keeping with the story of the Biblical flood – claimed that mountains had been formed by sedimentation, a theory called ‘Neptunism’. The competing theory of James

147 Hutton, of volcanism and unimaginably large movements of the earth’s crust, was dubbed ‘Plutonism’. Ortrud Westheider identifies elements of Cole and Church’s paintings that aligned them with particular schools of thought: Cole’s paintings of the Hudson River landscape included details of large rocks that were thought to have been deposited by the Flood, while “the high cliff in the painting The Last of The Mohicans with its solitary boulder is further proof of Cole’s belief in Neptunism” [Westheider, 2007: 71]. Church meanwhile shifted from Neptunism “to replace the aesthetic ideals of the sublime and the beautiful acquired from English models with the view of the empiricist” and to include in his paintings “the great variety of botanic and geological aspects of the landscapes recorded by science” [Westheider, 2007: 73].

Imperial Iconography

From the perspective of the 21st century, the paintings of the HRS record the American wilderness as it was filtered through the imagination of artists whose painting was eclectic and self-conscious, programmatic and generic. The HRS also records the will of a culture to conquer the open spaces of a continent, overwriting the natural world with a ‘concept of nature’ that had little to do with the world as it was, but as it was collectively wished to be. The grandiosity of many of the HRS paintings were only made possible because of the enormous popularity of the work in its day, as collectors and patrons supported Cole, Church and others in their most ambitious projects. As Westheider notes, in 1825, “only ten percent of all paintings displayed in American art galleries depicted landscapes; by 1850 that figure had risen to 90 percent” [Westheider, 2007: 67]. Just as the feedback loop of artist, editor, publisher, audience made it possible for SFI to flourish during the Pulp Era of the mid 20th century, so too the audience for HRS painting formed and changed the art by patronage.

For the HRS artists, their work had a special urgency as a mission for the future: as democracy bought chaos and social instability, so their art was to record, no matter how altered or fictive, a sensibility and philosophy of how man might reflect upon the grandeur of nature, and to ponder his place within it. Moreover, as Novak argues, the HRS was the foundation of an American pictorial legacy that had a direct influence on the formation of the 20th century’s popular visual imagination:

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“Each view of nature […] carried with it not only an aesthetic view, but a power self-image, a moral and social energy that could be translated into action. Many of these projections on nature augmented the American’s sense of his own unique nature, his unique opportunity, and could indeed foster a sense of destiny which, when it served to rationalize questionable acts and elevated thoughts could have a darker side. And the apparently innocent nationalism, so mingled with moral and religious ideas, could survive into another century as an imperial iconography” [Novak, 1980: 6].

Hudson River Hyperdrive

A comparison of the work of Chesley Bonestell and that of the HRS artists reveals an intriguing continuity. Born in 1888 and trained in New York in the early years of the 20th century, Bonestell would have no doubt been well aware of European influences such as Claude and Salvatore, as well as the Hudson River artists Cole and Church. Certainly, by the time of the late 1930s and 1940s and the reassessment of the HRS, Bonestell may well have been exposed to their work through art journals, magazines and newspapers. But regardless of whether Bonestell knew of their work directly, a resonant pulse is detected, a link between his art and the historical precedent of the HRS.

Bonestell’s technique of framing his picture planes with appropriately arranged rocks, mountains, clouds and smoke is an echo of the work of Claude and his followers. As is seen in both The Surface of Venus and A Nova Is Beginning to Melt The Mountains of A Hypothetical Planet this was a recurring compositional technique found throughout his Earth-bound and off-world landscapes. Another of Bonestell’s recurring motifs – a view directly into a source of light – is uncannily reminiscent of Church’s panoramic Cotopaxi and Bierstadt’s Sunset in the Yosemite Valley with their dramatic light sources, their images echoed in both A Nova Is Beginning to Melt… The End of The World as The Sun Becomes Nova and, most tellingly, in Bonestell’s 1949 painting Jupiter’s Surface [from The Conquest of Space] [Fig 4.35].

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Fig 4.35 Chesley Bonestell, Jupiter’s Surface, 1949. Oil on board, 41x51cm. Private Collection.

The images of the destruction that Bonestell created for Collier’s Magazine under the title The Nuclear Bombardment of New York City [1953] [Fig 4.36] are the spiritual and artistic descendants of Cole’s The Course of Empire – both artists giving form to imaginings of apocalypse that had great resonance for their audiences. The work of Luminist painters of the HRS such as Fitz Hugh Lane whose Gloucester Harbor at Sunrise [late 1850s] [Fig 4.37] painted in relatively modest scale [60x91 cm] is remarkably recalled in one of Bonestell’s most admired works, Assembling The Mars Expedition [1950] – the arrangement of ships in Lane’s painting approximated in Bonestell’s, and the group of sailors at the left of Lane’s painting echoed in the placement of astronauts in Bonestell’s image.

All this might just be coincidence. Perhaps Bonestell’s oft-repeated claim that his only influence was Maxfield Parish [1870-1966] was true and that the coincidental features of his work and the HRS is not a direct influence, but rather an illustrator’s short-hand for an easily decodable effect. Although Parish had techniques Bonestell emulated – such as removing visible brushstrokes to give the images the patina of illustrative realism – it was precisely this technique that had been deployed by the

150 Luminists. As Novak put it, it was this painterly technique that led to an “…eradication of stroke [that in turn] nullifies process and assists a confrontation with detail” [Novak, 1980: 24].

Fig 4.36 Chesley Bonestell, Hiroshima, USA. Colliers Magazine, August 5th, 1950.

For Bonestell, this was indeed the desired effect – an image that was not undercut by expressionist technique. Realism relies on effacement to achieve convincing mimesis and Novak claimed that it was this quality of the Luminist’s painting that created atmospheric effect, a “clarity of atmosphere […] applicable to both to air and crystal,

151 to hard and soft, to mirror and void” that led to a “contemplation of a world without movement, the spectator is brought into a wordless dialogue with nature [that] quickly becomes a monologue of transcendental unity” [Novak, 1980: 24]. Although much of Bonestell’s work is retrospectively imbued with an inescapable period charm redolent of commercial illustration techniques of the period they still carry an ecstatic revelation for people such as Wyn Wachhorst, sublime off world vistas that recall the Arcadian wilderness of 19th century America. And indeed, when Grant and Nichols speak of “the great beauty and drama in [the] stillness and depth” of Bonestell’s classic works, the resonant connection between the artist and the HRS is at its most apparent.

Fig 4.37 Fitz Hugh Lane, Gloucester Harbor at Sunrise, c. 1850. Oil on canvas, 60x91cm. Collection: Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts.

The eclectic and populist conception of dramatic space in the paintings of the HRS, and their embrace of sublimity in subject and execution — scale, spectacle, a sense of past, present and future — is reflected in the works of Bonestell in both the speculative dramas of space exploration and the magisterial calm of his planetary landscapes. Although Bonestell’s works were often painted at small scale this had little influence on their effect. Rarely seen in exhibition nearly all Bonestell’s works

152 were originally seen in magazines, their reproduction never larger than a copy of a page in Life or Collier’s.

As Novak argues, the grand physical size of paintings by Cole, Church and Bierstadt had a sublime effect for the viewer, as did Luminist seascapes and coastal pictures. In reproduction Bonestell’s work has the same evocation of the infinite depths of space that the painters of the 19th century achieved through the use of proportional scale. As Novak writes, “A perfect miniaturized universe offers to the spectator an irresistible invitation in terms of empathy” in which the spectator is “urged to conceptualize his size and enter the […] arena in which figures, when they exist, are no larger than twigs” [Novak, 1980: 24]. This conflation of space and time in the work of Bonestell connects the 19th and 20th centuries, as one conception of sublimity flows directly into another era – the post war years of the late 1940s and ‘50s — in which the terminal threat of the nuclear age was leavened by the hope that the power of the atom might be harnessed for peace.

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Fig 4.38 Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1958.

154 Facing Out Into The Void

The clearest feeling was still one of absence: the immense beach of La Baule was deserted, there was less than a dozen of us on the loop of blond sand, not a vehicle was to be seen on the streets; this had been a frontier that an army had just abandoned, and the meaning of this oceanic immensity was intertwined with this aspect of the deserted battlefield [Virilio, 1994: 9].

In 1945, at the age of 13, Paul Virilio saw the open ocean for the first time. Throughout the German occupation of France during World War 2 the coastline had been off limits to civilians as the Todt Organization – the engineering group named after its founder Fritz Todt – built concrete bunkers and other defenses along the European coast from Northern Norway to the French-Spanish border, a formidable blockade against invasion known as the Atlantic Wall [Fig. 4.38]. With the defeat of the Nazis and the opening of the coast, young Virilio was able to walk on the sands of the Loire estuary and encounter the horizon line of the ocean, a vision whose power he had not anticipated. “The discovery of the sea is a precious experience that bears thought,” he wrote in Bunker Archeology. “Seeing the oceanic horizon is indeed anything but a secondary experience; it is in fact an event in consciousness of underestimated consequences” [Virilio, 1994: 9]. The seeds of a fascination with the militarization of space itself, an idea that would drive much of Virilio’s subsequent philosophical writings, were forged in that summer.

The still active mine fields, the barbed wire and tank traps were in the process of being cleared. Abandoned bunkers were sentinels on hills, harbours, roads, dunes and sand. The view of the open sea afforded Virilio an encounter with what he called the “hydrosphere” – the calm of the sea with its dazzling luminosity below a limitless perfection of sky that stood in stark contrast to the ruin of the landscape. “When calling to mind the reasons that made the bunkers so appealing to me … I see it clearly now as a case of intuition and also as a convergence between the reality of the structure and the fact of its implantation alongside the ocean: a convergence between my awareness of spatial phenomena – the strong pull of the shores – and their being the locus of the works of the Atlantic Wall [Atlantikwall] facing the open sea, facing out into the void” [Virilio, 1994: 10].

155 For Virilio the bunkers brought up a host of historical associations, cultural memories of “Egyptian mastabas, the Etruscan tombs, the Aztec structures… as if this piece of artillery fortification could be identified as a funeral ceremony, as if the Todt Organization could manage only the organization of a religious space” [Virilio, 1994: 11]. The bunkers were not only located on lonely stretches of beach or headland, but also within French seaside towns, their forms suggesting not just the past, but also acting as a spectres of the future. Virilio likened the strange disjunction between civilian homes, local schools, bars and other urban spaces and the concrete bunkers as being “like a spacecraft parked in the middle of an avenue announcing the war of the worlds…” a remarkable comingling of military purpose and civilian space that “shed new light on what ‘contemporary’ has come to mean” [Virilio, 1994: 12]. Some years later, in 1953, a seven-year-old English boy named Chris Foss spent a holiday at the birthplace of his parents – the Channel Island of Guernsey. Occupied by German forces during the war, the island had been heavily fortified, and in the early 1950s the bunkers, concrete observation towers and other defenses were still in place. Foss remembered the strangeness of the landscape, this foreboding vista of concrete and barbed wire that was a perfect place to explore — and imagine. Foss, who would go on to become one of the most influential SFI artists of the second half of the 20th century, and as important to the genre as Chesley Bonestell, found enduring inspiration in the forms, shapes and design of the Guernsey bunkers

I’m fascinated by the proportions of the towers. They remind me of huge Easter Island gods looking out to sea, positioned as they are at strategic points around the island. They’re like big toothless masks. The towers are very precise, with a scientific taper to the top. The German’s could build an entire tower out of concrete in a forty-eight hour period. To this day I’m fascinated by concrete – the sheer mass of concrete contained in these towers is very impressive [Foss, 2011: 6].

Foss, who produced an iconic and much-copied style, produced SFI that embodied a sense of the sublime that Virilio had experienced on the Loire estuary. Foss’s trademark spaceships rejected the sleek V2-inspired look of Bonestell, for post- industrial behemoths covered in stripes, logos and dazzle lines. His work also invoked the paintings of John Martin, a 19th century artist whose pictures are widely acknowledged as anticipating SFI. Foss’s work also marks one of the last great

156 moments of classic SFI, before the genre of was largely subsumed by Hollywood movies – and the evaporation of the science fiction genre itself into the decentred visual aesthetic of the contemporary world.

Volcanoes on Jupiter

On January 14th 2005 the Huygens probe touched down on the surface of Titan. The images returned to Earth from the surface of Saturn’s largest moon were stunning – sand dunes, black mountains and seas of methane-ethane, eerie dark shapes against a dusty brown landscape. Instead of the glacial beauty rhapsodised by Wachhorst, the thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere obscured everything. That it looked nothing like Chesley Bonestell’s painting of 1944 was of little surprise. “Much of his work was scientifically unsound at the time he created it,” wrote Miller. “He was still indicating canals on Mars as late as the 1950s to say nothing of natural bridges on Phobos and volcanoes on Jupiter” [Miller, 1996: 143]. Bonestell’s paintings of the surface of the Moon featured craggy mountain peaks but despite the ability to verify such depictions by simply looking through a telescope no scientist or astronomer “ever questioned their accuracy, any more than one would question the reality of a photograph” [Miller, 2001: 93]. But it was photography that killed off this once dominant sub-genre of SFI as images of the Moon, Mars and the outer planets were returned to Earth, “space art” reduced from cheerleader status for the exploration of space to often-crude computer generated visualizations to fill in when no actual imagery existed.

At the time Bonestell died in 1986 the entire landscape of SFI had changed. The decline in SF magazine titles in the 1970s irrevocably altered the nature of the genre itself, hastening the rise of the genre signifier and the decline of illustrations of specific story moments. In the space created by this market retraction paperback novels became the active locus of SFI. In the US, in the late 1970s and ‘80s, artists such as Michael Whelan [Fig 4.39], Don Maitz [Fig 4.40] and Boris Vallejo [Fig 4.41] were illustrators of note [Nicholls, 1999: Illus, 613], their work representing an update of the venerable pictorial traditions of SFI – the alien, the space-suited explorer and the odd montage of images. Indeed, the careers of these artists trace the commercial

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Fig 4.39 Michael R. Whelan, Foundation, 1985. Acrylic on canvas, 81x50cms.

158

Fig 4.40 Don Maitz, Catchworld, 1978. Oil on Masonite, 76x50cm. Collection: the artist

159

Fig 4.41 Boris Vallejo, Gateways in The Sand, 1976. Oil on canvas, 65x100cm.

160 trajectory of SFI over the next 30 years, as artists rejected hard SF imagery for Tolkeinesque fantasy, a far cry from the classicism of Bonestell.

By contrast, Chris Foss dominated the UK SF paperback market in the late 70s and 1980s. An early passion for sketching and drawing had led to a teenage interest in recording the ruins of the Industrial Revolution. Foss “explored the aging railway tracks and disused mines that are still in evidence throughout the West Country …sketching the surrounding countryside in between building … intricate railway models ” [N.A. 1979: Intro, 5]. With access to books on fine art Foss also developed an appreciation for Turner: “The mist, the swirls, the light, the way the paint was applied – I find it very evocative” [Foss, 2011: 6]. Like Bonestell, Foss trained as an architect but he never practiced, and after early success with commercial illustration work in London in the late 1960s, he was eventually able to secure an agent.

By the early 1970s Foss was not only established but one of the most recognisable – and imitated – SFI artists working. Using fine brush and airbrush techniques to give his images a smooth and texture-free appearance, his work typically featured spacecraft rendered as a series of architectonic forms recalling Virilio’s tombs and temples, but bristling with antennae, covered in stripes, with smoking intake valves and blasting exhausts. Through contrasts of scale, and with dynamic cloudscapes and planetary surfaces, Foss’s work captured narrative drama with operatic scale. Peter Nicholls called Foss’s paintings “a celebration of technology … beautiful and deadly, [craft that] rear up over landscapes where humans are absent or tiny – yet the effect is bracing” [Nicholls, 1999: Foss, 441].

Brain Aldiss, writing in a foreword to an early collection of Foss’s work, observed that the artist was in love with “the monstrous, with angular momentum, with inertia-free projectiles and irresistible objects” and that the human figure when sighted in a painting “is a tiny soft creature, generally in overalls, vulnerable, hurried, among the abrasive landscapes of a technological tomorrow” a world of technology where, if humans had not been replaced by robots, “you can bet he doesn’t have so much as a pet cat aboard his vacuum-busting vehicle” [Aldiss, 1976: 2].

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Fig 4.42 Chris Foss, The Norman Conquest 2066, 1976.

162 The Bloodstar Conspiracy

Foss’s work relied on a simple but remarkably effective repetition of effects. In Norman Conquest 2066 [1973] [Fig 4.42] a black and yellow spacecraft blasts across the bottom right hand side of the picture trailing what appears to be fragments of the ship itself, a debris field that falls away into trailing black exhaust plume. At left is a tall tower with a tapering apex, recalling the bunkers of Guernsey, while another ship above, almost in silhouette, cuts across the sun. A desert landscape can be glimpsed through the smoke. Foss adds a number of halos and refractions — as though the image had been captured by a camera looking directly into the sun — while perspective is created by tapering shapes and the placement of the picture’s main elements at foreground, mid-ground and at far distance. Virtually all of Foss’s works featuring multiple spacecraft is a variation on this formula.

For pictures featuring single spaceships Foss often depicted the craft in orbit around a planet. The Bloodstar Conspiracy [1978] [Fig 4.43] presents the viewer with an aft view of a spacecraft that appears to be still under construction, as the ship was built in the manner of a concrete skyscraper. A light source just out of top left frame casts shadows of the logo-emblazoned stanchions across the body of the ship, the entire object an arrowhead aimed at a billowing and presumably immense plume of gas. Two years earlier Foss had painted an almost identical picture – Galactic Empires [1976] with variations on the size and placement of the ship and the addition of a star field and a distant planet. Throughout his career Foss repurposed his designs with slight variations and tweaks to successful pictures many times over, as the collection Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss [2011] ably demonstrates.

Alien or apocalyptic landscapes were inevitably stock in trade for SFI illustrators and Foss made numerous paintings depicting mass destruction or ominous structures: Torrent of Faces [1978] features typically Fossian stripes and lines wrapped around a fort-like structure threatened by roiling clouds, while his 1975 picture Lost Worlds [Atlantis Apocalypse] is a series of landmasses lifting up, buildings and towers toppling into the abyss. His atypical works were often for covers of novels by J.G. Ballard — Foss’s figure work for SFI was often unconvincing and awkwardly composed — but his 1977 cover painting for Ballard’s The Drought [Fig 4.44] has a

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Fig 4.43 Chris Foss, The Bloodstar Conspiracy, 1978.

164

Fig 4.44 Chris Foss, The Drought, 1977.

Fig 4.45 Chris Foss, Turner Spaceship, 1991.

165

simple but effective use of forced perspective, overloaded detail and a point of view looking directly into a light source, in this case a large white sun in an orange sky. A much later painting, Turner Spaceship [1991] [Fig 4.45] is the epitome of Foss’s style featuring all his trademark techniques and a title that acknowledges his artistic influences.

That the images Foss was producing rarely had anything to do with the stories inside the paperbacks were of little concern to the artist or publishers – they’d set a style that proved to be a popular and extremely effective marketing tool [Foss, 2011: 10]. Foss’s acolytes, such as Anthony Roberts, were able to produce works that approximated the grandeur of his images but rarely with his panache or operatic verve. For much of the 1970s, and well into the 1980s, Foss’s painting became the UK’s national look of SFI. As Peter Nicholson put it “while the style lasted it looked to the casual bookshop browser as if all UK-published SF was effectively the same book” [Nicholson, 1999: Illus, 613].

Turner, Martin, Sublime Space

Like Bonestell’s painting and its restatements of the work of the Hudson River School painters, Foss’s art is a descendent of the images and atmospheres of JMW Turner and John Martin. From Turner, Foss had taken techniques of atmosphere and dramatic revelation, the blunt perspective and bullish appearance of Turner Spaceship bowdlerizing the subtlety of Turner paintings such as The Fighting ‘Tremeraire’ Tugged to Her Last Birth, 1838 [Fig 4.46] or Rain, Steam and Speed: the Great Western Railway, 1844 [Fig 4.47] for dramatic, cinematic effect. Foss’s picture Lost Worlds [Atlantis Apocalypse] is a reimagining of Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath [1851-53]. But beyond these similarities of composition and subject there is another connection, an intriguing link between the ways these artists place the viewer in the picture.

Bonestell’s work assumes a point of view that would be theoretically achievable by standing on the surface of the planet or perhaps witnessing the scene from a spacecraft. Turner’s images of sea disasters or speeding trains, and Martin’s many

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Fig 4.46 JMW Turner, The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her last Berth To Be Broken Up, 1839. Oil on canvas, 91x122cm. Collection: National Gallery, London.

Fig 4.47 JMW Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844. Oil on canvas, 91x121cm. Collection: National Gallery, London.

167 Biblical scenes, place the viewer in positions that could not be achieved except by being right in the middle of the action. In Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed: the Great Western Railway the viewer is set by the side of the track with its oncoming train a blur of action and speed while The Fighting ‘Tremeraire’… is seen from the vantage point of the harbour. Martin’s The Last Judgment triptych of 1845-53 – of which The Great Day of His Wrath is the middle picture – relies on a similar point of view, the viewer looking upon the end of the world itself, but comfortably distant to it. Foss’s images, especially those depicting wholesale warfare or destruction, or even those placing the viewer on the path of an oncoming spacecraft, restate the techniques of Turner and Martin. Kant made the distinction between seeing such scenes first hand, and their representation in art – all the forces of nature might be depicted, from “thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven” to “the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force” but “provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature” [Kant, 1964: 101].

The ‘technological sublime’ theorised the effect and impact of technologies such as the steam train within the traditional landscape picture. Turner’s depiction of the train in Rain, Steam and Speed… broke with the tradition of depicting the landscape free of machinery, or, in many cases, even of the human figure, capitalizing on the novelty, force and thrill of iron and steel hurtling across the countryside [Venning, 2003: 274]. Although Kant’s formulation of the effect of the sublime, however distanced, remains compelling, there is something unresolved in the idea that a painting might capture the power of a machine. The arrival of the steam-powered train in the mid-18th century was a major challenge to the orthodoxy of a tradition of sublimity predicated on the belief of divine immanence. Just as the critic John Ruskin refused to even mention Turner’s painting on account of its “ugly subject” [Venning, 2003: 278] so too artists and critics in the time of Cole and Church in America struggled to reconcile modern technology with the landscape genre tradition. As Barbara Novak writes:

168 In art we have fascinating history of technological inventions presenting art conventions with no option but to exclude them. The automobile in twentieth- century art provided one such example. There were few effective ways of including it within an existing realist convention until the appearance of American pop art [Novak, 1980: 148]

Regardless of the irony of depicting interplanetary travel or battling spaceships in the manner of 19th century painting, Bonestell and Foss represent very different concepts of a human relationship to nature and technology. One of the more unfortunate aspects of Bonestell’s paintings of spacecraft was that they were invariably based on the German V2 rocket. Developed by the Nazis under the direction of Werner Von Braun, these powerful ballistic missiles were captured by the Americans at the end of World War 2. Von Braun, 100 V2 missiles and 115 German rocketry experts were taken to the United States in 1945 where they formed the basis of America’s fledgling space program [Paine, 1991: viii]. Yet Bonestell’s space imagery was far from warlike, offering peaceful visions of exploration and, despite the occasional mid-flight disaster [one picture depicting a collision between a ship and asteroid] he reconceptualised weapons of war as sleek objects of discovery. Looking at Bonestell’s spacecraft now one is reminded more of a 1950s car wing than of a city- levelling bomb.

As we have seen Foss drew equal inspiration from the spectre of abandoned Nazi fortifications on the island of Guernsey and the remnants of the Industrial Revolution’s train lines and abandoned mines. But where Bonestell offered optimism, Foss’s ships are essentially dystopian. His images purport to show interstellar travel but, as Aldiss observed, it is without human presence. Novak contended that the sublime landscape urged the viewer to imagine themselves within the picture, albeit through figures often “no larger than twigs” [Novak, 1980: 24]. Foss’s pictures propose no sense of nature at all, but a space where technology is transcendent. The traditions of landscape painting of the 19th century at least offered the viewer the consolation that even without God, there is at least nature - in Foss’s work, there is nothing beyond the fantasy. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe sees within Turner’s train an opposition to nature, a symbol of heteronomy, and that the “landscape potentially now has in it forces comparable to nature” but which – in the abstracted sublimity of contemporary technology [the computer] – are not relatable to nature,

169 and are forces that “have no respondent (as the wind has breathing) in the senses but only in the mind” [Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999: 67]. Foss’s ships and planetscapes have no association with any actual technology but are simply dynamic form creating an empty signifier – without a relationship to narrative [the story of the novels his paintings ostensibly illustrated] they are, in Kantian terms, symbols of violent action, recalling in their shapes, decoration and action war craft, not of the future, but of World War 2, refigured as Cold War fictions.

The Tragic Conversion

The work of Bonestell and Foss, and many other SFI artists, has been an area with which few contemporary artists have engaged. As we have seen in previous chapters artists have taken inspiration from the themes, concepts and ideas of science fiction more generally, yet few have been able to get to grips with one of its most popular forms. SFI is so singular, so bound by generic convention and governed by cultural location, that any attempt to deal with it invariably ends up looking like pastiche or parody, or worse, indistinguishable from the source material. One of the few artists to successfully negotiate these problems was the English painter Glenn Brown.

In the early 1990s Brown’s painting was based on images derived from art historical paintings sourced from art books reproduced at large scale, rendering the expressive brushwork of paintings by artists such as Frank Auerbach, Karel Appel and Willem De Kooning as flat surfaces. Brown’s paintings had the illusion of texture but the surface of a photograph, as though the ridges and valleys of thickly-applied paint were captured by a camera. In 1994 Brown painted a version of Chris Foss’s The Stars Like Dust [1976] [Fig 4.48] retitled Ornamental Despair (Painting for Ian Curtis) [1994] [Fig 4.49]. A comparison of the two pictures – Foss’s original and Brown’s version – shows little apparent difference between the two, with only slight variations in colour and detail in Brown’s version.

Brown would paint further versions of Foss’s pictures such as Exercise One (For Ian Curtis) [1995] [Fig 4.50] – quoting Futuristic Oil Tanker, [a.k.a. Red Oil Tanker] [1970] [Fig 4.51] - and Böcklin’s Tomb (After Chris Foss) [1998] [Fig 4.52] quoting Foss’s Floating Cities, [1981] [Fig 4.53]. Later Brown would paint a version of astronomical artist Adolf Schaller’s Hunters, Floaters, Sinkers, an illustration depicting Carl

170

Fig 4.48 Chris Foss, Stars Like Dust [aka Asteroid Hunters], 1976.

Fig 4.49 Glenn Brown, Ornamental Despair (Painting for Ian Curtis), 1994. Oil on canvas, 200x300 cm. Private Collection.

171

Fig 4.50 Glenn Brown, Exercise One (For Ian Curtis) 1995. Oil on canvas, 50x70cm. Private Collection.

Fig 4.51 Chris Foss, Red Tanker, 1970.

172

Fig 4.52 Glenn Brown, Böcklin’s Tomb, 1998. Oil on canvas, 221x330cm. Sander Collection.

Fig 4.53 Chris Foss, Floating Cities, 1981

173

Sagan’s speculative theories of possible airborne life forms in the outer planets as Jesus: The Living Dead [1998] and Anthony Robert’s Double Star [1973] as The Loves of The Shepherds [2000]. Brown also made a version of Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath as The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dali (after John Martin) in 1998.

Brown’s works made alterations to their original sources, sometimes, as in the case of Ornamental Despair… with only minor changes, whereas in Exercise One an entire spaceship was removed to leave an image of an iceberg floating in space. For Jesus: The Living Dead Brown took Schaller’s painting and added livid, “expressive” brushstrokes to the otherwise textureless original. Brown’s The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dali flipped Martin’s collapsing mountains from right to left, adding in the distance what appears to be the floating city from Foss’s painting. But the biggest alteration to all these images was the change in scale – where Foss and Robert’s images had been reproduced at the size of a paperback cover Brown exploded their images to immense size: Ornamental Despair measuring some 200x300 centimetres while Double Star was 219x336 centimetres. Even Brown’s The Tragic Conversion at 222x323 centimetres was actually larger than Martin’s painting, already huge at 196.5x303.2 centimetres.

While Brown’s work could be seen within the context of the practices of appropriation his work is far from a pure quotational practice as he alters, adds and inflates his source material – aided by a free mix of song lyrics, art historical references and painting titles in the names of the new works – all of which combine within a more intuitive practice. As one critic put it Brown’s “goal is not proximity to source material, but rather mixing sources as a DJ does to create combinations of words, images and even types of brushstrokes” his motivation “seems more born out of lovingly fetishising his sources, whether obscure or iconic art works. He carries the appropriationist torch to a next level – further blurring the cultural status of original and copy, traditional methods and avant-garde gestures” [Gingeras & Steiner, 2009]. There is also a distinct element of nostalgia in Brown’s paintings. In 1999 Jennifer Higgie made the observation that “in The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dali (after John Martin) (1998), for example, an image of the future wrestles with a futuristic vision from the past, filtered through the complex relationship the artist has with the

174 memory of memorable paintings” [Higgie, 1999]. Christoph Grunenberg argued that Brown’s work had a pronounced “retro flavour” looking back to the 1970s and 1980s and “the heyday of science fiction film” [Grunenberg, 2009: 19], claiming that

With their innocent belief in ever-evolving technology as the saviour of humankind and a childlike fascination with special effects, reaching a degree of sophistication hitherto unknown [Star Wars was released in 1977], the science fiction on which Brown draws are highly attractive visualisations of a future that never was [Grunenberg, 2009: 19].

At the time that Brown was repainting Foss and Roberts in the mid to late 1990s the fashion for their work on paperback covers had already passed. Foss had some success as a concept illustrator for a number of film productions including Superman [Donner, 1978] and Alien [Scott, 1979] as well as unproduced versions of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune and Stanley Kubrick’s AI. Although both of these latter films were eventually made, and his contributions to the production design of Superman and Alien lovingly anthologized in publications on his work, few of Foss’s designs were used in the final films.

No Space

Brown’s SF paintings of Foss’s work and others revisits the ocular fantasies of 19th century painting in the quotation of artists whose work attempted to give form to the sublime, recontextualising these art historical images into a contemporary collage of associations and reference points. By compressing and conflating multiple references into single pictures – Foss mixed with Martin, Foss with Böcklin, pop music and space fantasy, poetry and pop lyrics, the painted surface with the flattened space of the photograph – Brown’s paintings also capture something of the contemporary cinematic space. In his discussion of Brown, Grunenberg argues that

Brown plays with the dynamic of the panoramic, long-distance vision and the close-up through intricate detailing executed with a marked lack of expression. The viewer is overwhelmed by the scale and monumentality of the image, while, at the same time, desperately lost in the minutiae of

175 descriptive detail, confusedly attempting to decipher the mysteries of the making of the work [Grunenberg, 2009: 19].

This observation echoes a suggestion by Anne Hollander that the sublime landscapes of the 19th century – especially those of Martin — may seem “utterly remote from any human consciousness, even any artist’s” and that this remoteness lies in a painting’s “visible retreat from any claim to entire comprehension, by anyone’s eye and mind, of even a small fragment of the phenomenal world.” [Hollander, 1989: 264]. While this argument could equally apply to Brown it also fits the shape and form and dazzling depthlessness of contemporary fantasy cinema – a universe of details on a flat plane, a no-space of infinite depth and neutralized wonder in the landscape format of the 16:9 frame. The located eye of Martin and Turner — and perhaps Foss too — has given way to a decentred vision that can swoop and zoom through anarchies of destruction in the cinematic eco-catastrophes of the last decade, or sit resolutely still in the television coverage of man made and natural disasters – all stupefyingly resistant to comprehension. When Damien Broderick observed that SF film had “finally came close to matching the immense spectacle of space travel, physical transformation, and sheer luminosity of metaphor that had always worked at a dreamlike level in classic SF” [Broderick, 2009: 44-45] he delivered his observation with a degree of ambivalence. For all the unfettered excitement of seeing a cinematic representation of an image that had only previously been conjured by text, there is also a palpable sense of disappointment that such an intimate fantasy – an image of your imagination – is now thoroughly externalized and commercialised.

Disappearing Space

In Bunker Archeology Virilio suggests that the Third Reich’s concept of total war demanded the conquest of space – the Atlantic Wall, the sky, perhaps even outer space itself: “the sky had volatilized, everything had become a field of action, little was missing before the war became total” [Virilio, 1994: 57]. But the Nazi aesthetic was also one of disappearance. Albert Speer’s “theory of the value of ruins” speculated that the modern materials used in the construction of public buildings, roads and monuments would not provide, at some future time, the kind of inspirational aesthetic value found in Roman ruins, and therefore more traditional

176 materials would be used to achieve the post-mortem effect. However, with the defeat of Germany in 1945 and the destruction of its major architectural works – such as the post-war dismantling of the Nuremberg stadium – little remained of the Third Reich’s vision of the future. “In the end,” wrote Virilio, “these bunkers obtained the role of the prestige monuments, witnessing not so much the power of the Third Reich as its obsession with disappearance” [Virilio, 1994: 97]. This is a tantalizing suggestion – while the Nazis may have been defeated, their technocratic vision would influence the foundation of yet another sequence of spatial conquests.

The Open Road

In previous chapters we have seen how a long historical line of artists have adapted and repurposed concepts of sublimity into a variety of hybrid forms – from landscape painting of the 19th century, translated through the SFI of Bonestell and Foss, the painting of Glenn Brown, in films such as The Day After Tomorrow [Emmerich, 2004], Avatar [Cameron, 2009], 2012 [Emmerich, 2009] and Knowing [Proyas, 2009], and in the work of contemporary video artists. There remains however one last link in this historical chain to consider – the style and language of car advertising.

In her book Another Science Fiction: Advertising The Space Race 1957-1962, Megan Prelinger describes the intimate relationship between the post World War 2 space race, the industries that would provide the technology to accomplish the American government’s goals, and the advertising that was created to sell both product and Cold War propaganda to US consumers [Prelinger, 2010]. Contemporaneous with the space race was the construction of interstate highways throughout the US as part of the The Federal-Aid Highway Act signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1956 [U.S. Dept. of Transportation].

The exploration of space and the expansion of the US roadways across the continent were conflated in a series of ads that drew parallels between them. “Just as the highway system was promoted as a link between distant countryside and farms with urban consumers, a route from farm to market,” wrote Prelinger, “the Moon and planets were widely seen as potential sources of valuable minerals, the space program was to provide a route for off Earth mining” [Prelinger, 2010:162].

177 Advertising agencies drew on the talents of graphic artists to give this analogy form and, perhaps unsurprisingly, just as Bonestell reiterated the techniques of the Hudson River School, so too the visual language of this advertising was not so much futuristic as it was a call back to the previous century. Advertising was aimed at normalising what in the 1950s was an almost entirely speculative industry of space exploration and exploitation. Advertising would reverse the relationship between the nominally possible and the immediately achievable by valorising the creation of highways and the vehicles that would drive on them. “Highways are emblematic of the difference between domestication and wildness in the American landscape,” argued Prelinger. “In much the same way that roadlessness denotes wilderness on public lands, it is the extension of “roads” into … interplanetary space that delineates and dewilds a landscape previously wilder than any encountered on Earth” [Prelinger, 2010: 162]. This concept of the road as a harbinger of modernity has distinct historical precedents in the building of the railroads into the American West in the 19th century [Prelinger, 2010: 161]. Car advertising of the 21st century reiterates the language of the 19th century to imbue products with a sense of futurity, reiterating this process of looking forwards by restating the past.

This combination of tradition and futurity is not unprecedented – either in a wider historical sense or as a specific formulation of art and commerce. Just as the US had expropriated men and missiles from Nazi Germany to launch its post war space program, so too its program of highway building had distinct parallels with the Third Reich’s civil engineering programs of the 1930s. The German autobahns had been initially planned in the 1920s under the Weimar Government and construction of the first highway between Köln and Bonn was completed in 1932. Under the government of the National Socialists and the appointment by Adolf Hitler of Fritz Todt, later the leader of the Todt Organization, as Inspector General of Road Construction to oversee the building program, the new highways were seen as a valuable propaganda tool to enhance and promote the Nazi regime’s political ambitions. The Nazis employed painters to valorise the building of the Reichsautobahnen and predict its look and effect in the future [Zeller, 2007: 64]. This type of painting, known as “autobahn painting”, was based on classical landscape painting traditions reimagined as an aberrant kind of modernism, a style that would “revive the genre of landscape painting, that was underrepresented in Modernity, by giving it a

178 technological orientation” [Zeller, 2007: 64]. The program of the Nazis and the US Government were almost identical. As Thomas Zeller puts it,

The dominance of roads over space corresponds with their dominance over time. The regime obviously saw itself in the form of the highways as a type of government that was focused far into the future, one that made possible a harmonious coexistence of nature and technology [Zeller, 2007: 64].

The building of highways is now unremarkable, the futuristic glow of its one-time association with space exploration faded into cultural memory. But as the government of the Third Reich and the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower demonstrated, a contemporary aesthetic is invariably based on visual traditions that are centuries old.

Formula & Genre

Car advertising is notable for its absolute adherence to generic formula. Cars are typically depicted in one of two broad categories of advertising — retail or brand advertising. Retail advertising is aimed at consumers at either national or local levels, and can be tailored to specific target market considerations such as the car’s technical features, or promote the vehicle as a lifestyle accouterment. Retail advertising has many variations in tone and style, visual sophistication and placement. Brand advertising, however, is far more formulaic and is international in scope – brand ads can be shot anywhere in the world, and then published and screened anywhere in the world, with only minute variations in badging [the name of the model of the car in the local market]. Indeed, car brand advertising is so strictly generic that a simple description of one print ad might just as easily describe all print ads of a similar category: a new model car is shown driving across a rugged country landscape, mountains in the distance, the road beneath a blur as if the vehicle had

179

Fig 4.54 Subaru, Photographer: Mark Llewellynn, 2004.

Fig 4.55 Lexus, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2009.

180 been captured passing at high speed, or as if the viewer was somehow travelling alongside the speeding object, the camera-eye substituting for human vision. A recent ad for Subaru [Fig 4.54] is a visual typology of this type of branding. The car is at bottom right of frame against a background of picturesque rolling mountains, clouds at sunset and a snaking road that draws the viewer’s eye from background to foreground. The pictorial centrality of the car is enhanced and emphasised by the blur of the road but which remains a sharply defined product. Crucially, the car is seen in front-on in three-quarter profile to allow a general impression of the car’s styling.

In a print ad for a recent model Lexus [Fig 4.55] the countryside is replaced by a cityscape – but much of the same visual styling applies, from the impression of speed, the forced perspective and the receding road, here emphasised by the trail of lights left by other, now invisible, cars. Variations to this classic visual style are illustrated by an ad for Audi [Fig 4.56] that situates the car in a parking station, an advertisement for a late model Mitsubishi that places the car on the left hand side of frame rather than the right [Fig 4.57] and an ad for a Porsche Boxter [Fig 4.58] that shows the car speeding away from the viewer. The car might be also be seen in situ, such as in an ad for a Range Rover, where the car is stationary and placed amid mountain peaks [Fig 4.59].

Screen versions of brand advertisements take these pictorial conventions and extend them through a montage of shots of the car seen in non-specific locations. The KIA Optima K5 2011 advert made for the South Korean market depicts a car endlessly driving, perhaps in circles, through white sand dunes beneath a spectacular cloud- dotted sky. The location is both nowhere and everywhere. By contrast, Toyota’s Testing for Quality ad places a car in what appears to be a futuristic lab. As the song Love Hurts plays on the soundtrack the car is pushed through a series of “thermal tests” from a deep freeze to a heat test, culminating in the car being subjected to the exhaust blast of a Saturn V rocket engine.

The tradition of the sublime as Bonestell and Foss interpreted it is clearly evident in these ads. The landscapes serve as a framing device for the technology, a spatial tension between artificiality and nature. Like Bonestell, and especially Foss, the cars are depicted in a manner that enhances a realist, traditional perspective. Echoes of

181

Fig 4.56 Audi, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2010.

Fig 4.57 Mitsubishi, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2010.

Fig 4.58 Porsche, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2006.

182

Fig 4.59 Land Rover, Photographer: Diederik van Heyningen, 2006.

Fig 4.60 Land Rover, Photographer: Kerry Wilson, 2011.

183 the paintings of ships and trains by Turner are found lurking here too, the atmospheric obfuscations eliminated for the clarity of a computer-generated image. While these car ads foreground a readily understandable visual tradition, and thus enhance their ability to communicate relatively complex messages in short amounts of time, their form is a complex hybridisation of art historical references and elements of a contemporary, technological sublime. These categories are of course far from inviolable with examples of ads upsetting the formula for an ironic commentary of this visual tradition. A print ad for Land Rover depicts the driver reaching the limit of the illusion [Figs 4.60]. This kind of play with the iconography of car branding is, however, quite rare and while it shows a degree of reflexive understanding of a visual code it also underscores the dominance of the generic style.

The Bounds of Realism

Is the kind of imagery found in car advertising operating at the level of the science fictional? The definition offered by Svilpis of SFI is worth considering here. Svilpis claimed that SFI is mimetic in that it offers a plausible representation of reality that is also a compelling visual experience. Car advertising operates along similar lines. Although most car ads opt for realism there is also a degree of visual abstraction. In the Toyota Testing for Quality and the KIA Optima television commercials the bounds of realism are stretched – neither is to be taken literally, yet they are also emblematic and ideographic image sequences that relate to cultural memory and fantasy. Car ads speak of the industry that created them, from the technological apparatus of industrial and commercial design, fabrication and distribution, from raw materials and advanced entertainment technologies, to the creation, transmission and reception of the ad itself. There is an unequivocal connection between the technological sublime of the 19th century, the conquest of space of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the afterlife of the classical sublime, something that is as palpably real, but as spectral as the UV dashboard lighting of a luxury sports car. Virilio’s ‘culture of disappearance’ underscores Longinus’s suggestion that the sublime is achieved through repetition and form – as one cultural moment or aesthetic seems to dissipate, it is reformulated in a new guise. The imagery of SFI and its speculative history are waypoints in a much longer time line – one that begins in an uncertain pre modern era, is focused in the formulation of genre, then disappears, only to reassemble itself in the contemporary field, as if brand new, but ancient in spirit.

184 Tubbieland in Bad Decline Mimetic processes in the zone of the science fictional

Remarkably Strange

This is a world without sin or strife. The worst thing that ever happens is sometimes the noo-noo malfunctions. The Sun Baby is God. In a sinless world, you don't need a stern God, God can just as well be a baby, peering happily down on Her beloved creatures [“Zorro-3” IMDB.com].

There is something remarkably strange about the Teletubbies. Its live-action narratives are uncomplicated and repetitive. The setting of a domed building sited amidst rolling green lawns under a startling blue sky is cartoonish in its simplicity. Each episode begins in the same way: a bright yellow sun rises above the horizon, the brilliant avatar of a watchful baby’s face laughs as the action begins below [Fig. 4.61]. Four colour-coded characters, Tinky Winky [purple], Laa-Laa [yellow], Dipsy [green] and Po [red], live in a luxurious techno-home called the Tubbytronic Superdome [Fig 4.62, 4.63]. Their needs are attended to by an anthropomorphic elephant-like vacuum cleaner called “the Noo-Noo”. The four Tubbies venture out into the garden-like landscape where they interact with each other and objects such as prams or rocking horses that periodically materialise from thin air. At other times a gigantic pinwheel that towers over the landscape rotates and showers the Tubbies with ecstatic visions that appear on the television sets in their stomachs; real children are then seen in segments interacting while playing [making milkshakes, colouring in] or doing chores [cleaning, feeding pets]. When the day is over, periscope-speakers emerge from the ground to tell the Tubbies that it’s time to go to sleep. The episode concludes with the avatar-baby-sun setting.

The sense of estrangement that the adult viewer experiences while watching Teletubbies is profound. We detect bizarre conflations of the cute and grotesque in the bodies of the Tubbies, echoing depictions of aliens or projections of post-human

185

Figs. 4.61-62-63. Teletubbies [BBC Television/Ragdoll Productions, 1997-2001] TV series.

186 mechanical/biological/networked hybrids. We imagine particular science fictional tropes that might explain the context of the Tubby machines and the idyllic landscapes of their world. While the program has its own internal logic there is much in the Tubbieverse that’s left unexplained; how is it that the Teletubbies are watched over by a subterranean machine? Why does the avatar-baby-face-sun float in front of the clouds? Who built the Tubbytronic Superdome? Where is this seemingly limitless world of green lawns and far horizons? And, perhaps most importantly, how did the Tubbies themselves come to be?

This uneasy intermingling of elements makes an interpretation of the program problematic since Teletubbies was a TV program aimed at children aged between nine months and 36 months [Ragdoll.co.uk]. One might reasonably argue that the program isn’t meant to make sense for adults yet Teletubbies offers an intriguing insight into the process of mimesis in cultural production. While it might be argued that cultural objects such as art works, television programs or literary novels have implicit mimetic properties in the Aristotelian sense, it is the contention of this chapter that whatever mimetic properties a program like Teletubbies might discreetly possess, its relationship to the real world, and by extension an interpretation of its possible meanings, connections and implications, is a transaction between the cultural object and the audience. In effect mimesis is a constructed meaning potentially separate and unintended on the part of its makers. Teletubbies may well have been conceived as a quasi-educational entertainment for the very young, yet it is also a prime example of how the resonant field of the science fictional stretches beyond generic manifestations such as the SF novel or film and into unlikely parallel worlds.

We will consider the Teletubbies in the following ways: through a consideration of the Tubbies bodies, then through an examination of the program’s setting and the connections between individual components of the story and manifestations of these components beyond the program itself, and finally through vernacular interpretations of the program’s meaning.

187 Grotesque Tubbies

so i was up late listening to music the other week gazing at the tv screen, teletubbies came on. then during the intro, that baby sun who appears in every episode suddenly pulled a demonic face, i was freaked out and didnt know what to think and forgot about. i was up late again yesterday and decided to check it out again, when whadya know the baby pulls a demonic face once again!! check it out!!! [“Welivefortheson”Abovetopsecret.com].

The Teletubbies embody the concept of the human/machine interface in a literal and unconcealed way, signifiers of the “collapsing of boundaries” that was much theorised in the wake of the cyberpunk subgenre of SF that emerged in the early 1980s. The core of Cyberpunk, it was argued, was based on the notion that “the boundaries between subjects, their bodies and the ‘outside world’ [were] being radically reconfigured” and that “the key analytical categories we have long used to structure our world, which derive fundamental division between technology and nature, are in danger of dissolving, the categories of the biological, the technological, the natural, the artificial and the human, [were] now beginning to blur” [Featherstone & Burrows, 1999: 3].

While the Tubbies and their integrated bodies could be read within the strictest definitions of cyberpunk theory they are, like the hybrid figures of much recent cyberpunk literary and cinematic SF, representatives of a much older cultural from – that of the science fictional grotesque. In his essay On the Grotesque in Science Fiction Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. argues that SF is typically divided into two kinds of distinct experiences of cognitive estrangement – the sublime and the grotesque: “The sublime expands consciousness inward as it encompasses limits to its outward expansion of apprehension,” argues Csicsery-Ronay. “The grotesque is a projection of fascinated repulsion/attraction out into objects that consciousness cannot accommodate, because the object disturbs the sense of rational, natural categorization” [Csicsery-Ronay, 2002:71].

Csicsery-Ronay argues that the anomaly has been the driving force of scientific inquiry since monstrous aberrations challenge the conventional taxonomies of received knowledge, while in the hands of writers, artists and poets the grotesque demonstrates “the power of the imagination over the habits of nature” [Csicsery-

188 Ronay, 2002:72]. Characters of fairy tales and folklore challenge the orthodoxy of the familiar world. Csieser-Ronay’s conception of the grotesque opens up the Tubbieverse to a much deeper cultural timeline and it’s one with a direct connection to SF

SF’s characteristic sense of grotesque wonder is the response to new, boundary violating phenomena that are either discovered by scientific observation or synthesized by scientific invention. The grotesque phenomena are believed to be intelligible in naturalistic terms, but are nonetheless surprising prodigies of nature's imagination [Csicsery-Ronay, 2002:71].

Somebody made the Tubbies– a creator’s hand is evident everywhere in the blatant unnaturalness of their bodies and environment. The Tubbies are in this sense a prime example of an intervention into nature and, while one might be beguiled by their cuteness and baby-like behaviour, their superficial attractiveness supports another of Csieser-Ronay’s contentions, that the rupture between the natural and the unnatural that was once so feared and despised is no longer strange and unsettling to contemporary audiences – indeed when genetic manipulation, cosmetic alteration and networked interactions are no longer concepts of the future but signifiers of the present “in such a world the grotesque has little of its previous significance, for the de-definition of forms is an accepted aspect of social reality.” [Csicsery-Ronay, 2002:73-74].

Tubbysublime

The Teletubbies, when we see them, are living in a postglacial environment, so the earliest this can be is in the first interglacial period of that ice-age - about 50,000 years in the future. The next time slot would be 100,000 years after that - 150,000 years in the future. This starts to stretch the limits of credulity for the Noo Noo's ability to continue operating. We wouldn't expect to find any of the house's systems operable in this sort of time frame. So we can confidently date Teletubbieland at around 50,000 years from now.”[“Moose- spesh Moosespesh.com].

The push-pull between cuteness and strangeness in the Tubbies is one aspect of the program’s science fictional aesthetic. “Teletubbies casts childhood as both familiar

189 and alien - just as the Teletubbies themselves are – and poses television as a mediator of the uncertain boundaries between adulthood and childhood, familiar and alien, human and inhuman,” writes Jonathan Bignell [Bignell, 2005: 374]. The reflexive nature of the Tubbieverse - the tension between the setting, story and the self-aware mode of repetition within the program - plays out in individual narratives that flirt with recognisable SF tropes, namely the delimitation between technical reality and the potential of a human/machine interface that moves beyond the mind/body and into the material universe. The Tubbies are in part a rendering of another SF sub-genre known as the New Space Opera.

The New Space Opera is, as Christopher Palmer argues, a kind of “galactic empire fiction” that is “usually set very far away from here, and very far away from now” [Palmer, 1999:73]. The sub-genre is marked by “an ambitious, multifarious inclusiveness [...] complicated relations with textuality and intertextuality; a complicated depiction of space as non-coherent, subject to no uniform rules” and featuring “decentred subjects” [Palmer, 1999:74]. These are also identifiable features of the Tubbieverse: it is exotic and distant, technologically and socially utopian, and displaying a particularly postmodern sensibility of inclusiveness and attitudes to gender. But it is the sense of the Tubbieverse as a ‘non-coherent space, subject to no uniform rules’, a pliable and malleable series of worlds created by unimaginably powerful technological forces that joins the Tubbies to the New Space Opera.

The New Space Opera typically casts its humans, post-humans, aliens and avatar characters in settings that defy the limits of known technological achievability – the scale is gigantic, featuring faster-than-light-speed capable starships traversing the galaxy, vast space stations and artificial ring worlds that could only be destroyed by unimaginably powerful super weapons. There are numerous examples of narratives among the fictions of the authors most commonly associated with literary New Space Opera – Iain M. Banks, Dan Simmons, Paul McCauley, Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds among them – that depict operatic narratives in a cold and functional realist prose that in turn renders fantasy with the patina of the plausible. Banks is in many ways the key writer of the New Space Opera, publishing 13 science fiction novels and one short story collection since the appearance of his first SF novel Consider Phlebas in 1987 [Iainbanks.net].

190

Banks’ 1996 novel Excession is a typical example. Its narrative tells of the unexpected arrival of an object – a perfect black body sphere that improbably appears to be older than the universe itself. Its mere presence and ambiguous nature proves a challenge to the Culture, a galaxy-spanning civilisation populated with human-like men and women, artificially intelligent spacecraft, “drones” and a litany of aliens and networked avatars who vie for control of the “big dumb object”.[1]

The Culture is a civilisation with the ability to shape matter into virtually any physical form – and it often seems to do so on a whim. Excession opens with the character Dajeil Gelian living in exile in a lighthouse on the remote and rugged shore of an ocean. From her tower she regards the world.

Far out amongst the heaving grey waves, beneath drifting banks of mist, the great slow bodies of some of the small sea's larger inhabitants humped and slid. Jets of vapour issued from the animals' breathing holes in exhaled blasts that rose like ghostly, insubstantial geysers amongst the flock of birds accompanying the school, causing them to climb and wheel and scream, side-slipping and fluttering in the cool air. High above, slipping in and out of pink-rubbed layers of cloud like small slow clouds themselves, other creatures moved, dirigibles and kites cruising the upper atmosphere with wings and canopies extended, warming in the watery light of a new day [Banks, 1996:3].

It is a rugged place with a “two-thousand-metre-high cliff” facing a roiling ocean straight out of Edmund Burke’s sublime nature [Banks, 1996:4]. Gelian is visited by the ironically named Amorphia, an avatar of the AI spacecraft Sleeper Service. Informed that the ship must now fly off to engage with the mysterious big dumb object, Gelian’s 40 year exile must come to end – and so must this world. It transpires that Gelian’s home is not a planet or even a real ocean – although everything she witnesses from wildlife to the sky to the water in the ocean is real – it has simply been summoned into existence by the spacecraft – and the Culture’s – ability to transform matter into shapes pleasing to its inhabitants. The shore and the ocean and everything else must be disassembled, “all to change, Dajeil Gelian

191 thought, all to change, and the sea and the sky to become as stone, as steel” [Banks, 1996:11].

The Tubbie’s world features big dumb objects and environments that shift and change: plants, machines and entire oceans are summoned from nowhere for our consideration before being subsumed back into the fabric of the Tubbieverse. In the episode Tropical Fish the Tubbies witness a moment of this technological sublimity.

After a sudden downpour from animated clouds, a large silvery lake appears and three ocean liners move across it to music based on the Christmas carol I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In. The large liners move slowly and majestically across the lake while the camera remains static, producing an otherworldly and mesmerizing effect. [Bignell, 2005:375].

It would seem then that the Tubbies and their world are just as connected to the category of the science fictional sublime as they are to the science fictional grotesque. Their world shifts and changes magically and without explanation, perhaps much as children regard the real world with its baffling wonders and mysteries, but also as adults regard the transformative potential of technology.

The Heliocentric Tubbieverse

"Luicfer is already arrive! We have to kill the Sun Infant!" Po exclaimed. "Twinky Winky, hurry, we're running out of time!" With hesistation, Twinky Winky left, running towards the Sun Infant. The heat and pressure was intense, but Twinky Winky wasn't afraid, at all. He pulled the secert weapon from his purse...the Sun Infant stopped setting all of a sudden. The Sun Infant stared at the secert weapon, which was just a pacifer. "You wish to destory me with that?" the Sun Infant voice boomed. "How foolish, you insignificent mortal!" [“Nitroglycerinexplodes”].

Perhaps one of the most confronting aspects of the world of the Tubbies is the sun- avatar-baby’s-face that introduces each episode. It rises, observes and reacts to the action and then signals the conclusion of the show as it sets. Featuring the face of a child perhaps no more than two years old the sun spectre is both an embodiment of fiat lux and a secular technological creation. While this strange apparition could be

192 considered in the context of the Teletubbies connections to the New Space Opera [and its extravagant imagining of a vast technological instrumentality that could create an artificial sun] the Tubbieverse’s heliocentrism proposes some intriguing connections between the Sun Avatar and the projects of a number of contemporary artists.

Art and religion, so closely entwined throughout their shared history, have repeatedly turned to the sun to symbolise the divine. As Barbara A. Weightman observed,

Life's universal cycles ebb and flow through tides of darkness and light. However varied in interpretation, light is envisioned as the essence of life, whereas darkness echoes inevitable death. In biblical creation, Fiat Lux eradicates darkness from the face of the abyss. It is no accident that "seeing the light" heralds emergence from a murky ignorance.. [Weightman, 1996:59].

In 2010 the Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer installed the work Solar Equation in Federation Square, Melbourne, as part of the Light in Winter Festival [Fig 4.64]. Featuring “the world’s largest spherical balloon” the orb was a scale model of the sun some “100 million times smaller than the real thing” [Lozano-Hemmer.com]. Projections on to the surface of the balloon were of “live mathematical equations that [simulated] the turbulence, flares and sunspots that can be seen on the surface of the Sun” and used the latest “solar observatory imaging available from NASA, overlaid with live animations derived from Navier-Stokes, reaction diffusion, perlin, particle systems and fractal flame equations” [Lozano-Hemmer.com].

Although the amassed technology used to create and simulate the activity on the Sun created a schematic outline, Solar Equation, sited in the densely built centre of Melbourne, had an impressive visual impact. Lazano-Hemmer was careful to distance the work from a solely political or scientifically didactic reading suggesting the work might also be situated within the tradition of the sublime.

Writing on his website the artist stated that

While pertinent environmental questions of global warming, drought, or UV radiation might arise from the contemplation of this piece, Solar Equation intends to likewise evoke romantic environments of ephemerality, mystery and paradox, such as those from Blake or Goethe. Every culture has a unique

193 set of solar mythologies and this project seeks to be a platform for both the expression of traditional symbolism and the emergence of new stories[Lazono-Hemmer.com].

Solar Equation allowed viewers with the appropriate iPhone or iPod app to remotely control the colour and seasonal variation of sun activity within the simulation. The artist had also devised a real time tracking technology that allowed the five projectors beaming images on to the spherical surface to compensate for any movement. The immediate theatricality of the work was undeniable but it was in this process of interactivity and obfuscation of technique that revealed the true nature of the artist’s speculative ‘new stories’. In an interview Lazano-Hemmer explained the desired effect of the piece.

From the point of view of someone watching it, it just looks like it works. But the engineering behind it enables that uncanny moment of actually having a registration between the real and the virtual [...] That really matters to me, because what I’m trying to do with my work is emphasise [...] how virtual the material is and how material the virtual is. So to be able to have that exact registration is what allows people to have that moment of suspension of disbelief. It’s like “Oh ok, there’s the sun up there”, you know [McQuire, Spatial/Aesthetics.com].

The disjunction between experience and understanding in Solar Equation underscores the mimetic nature of the work. The viewer knows that the sun cannot float above Federation Square but for that disturbing moment, it does. This sort of slippage between the apparent and the real produces the same kind of cognitive estrangement as science fiction. Such an effect can also be achieved by a deliberately and blatantly unreal rendering of the same experience. As noted, the visual effect in the Teletubbies that produces the avatar sun face doesn’t put the face in place of the position of the real sun but rather places it below the clouds, just as Lozano-Hemmer did with Solar Equation. In both instances the suggestion is that the sun is artificial and, as Jacques Derrida asked, “if the sun is no longer completely natural, what in nature does remain natural?” [Derrida, 1982:251].

The collaborative artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, known as Semiconductor, have repeatedly used within their work simulations of the sun along

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Fig 4.64 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Solar Equation, 2010. Spherical captive balloon, helium, tethers and winches, 5 HD projectors, 7 computers with custom-made software, Wi-Fi network, iOS app, 14 meters diameter.

Fig 4.65 Semiconductor, Black Rain, 2009. 03:00 mins SD + HD/ 16:9. Installation version: single screen portrait HD / 17 minute loop.

195 with imagery from solar observatories to explore “the material nature of our world and how we experience it, questioning our place in the physical universe” [Semiconductor.com] Works such as Brilliant Noise [2006], Out of the Light [2008], Black Rain [2009] and Heliocentric [2010] experiment with depictions of the sun removed from the experience of daytime Earth-bound observation. Black Rain used images sourced from NASA’s twin satellite solar observation mission STEREO but where many viewers might be familiar with the pristine finished product of publicly released footage, the artists used unprocessed “dirty data” [Fig 4.65]. Semiconductor stated that “by embracing the artifacts, calibration and phenomena of the capturing process we are reminded of the presence of the human observer who endeavours to extend our perceptions and knowledge through technological innovation” [Semiconductor.com].

Although this description might suggest a certain rawness to the execution of the work, Black Rain is, like all of the duo’s work, highly accomplished. The work suggests its sense of authenticity by allowing for apparent visual glitches but is in fact an orchestrated sequence of images matched by a crafted soundtrack. What is curious about this work in particular, and forms a fascinating connective line to the sun avatar of the Tubbieverse, is the reminder of the human observer through the manipulation of expectation. Where one might expect a computer generated image of the kind found in a big budget science fiction film, the viewer’s presence and their aspirations for knowledge is suggested by the apparently “low fi” technique. In the Teletubbies the viewer – the child – is placed at the centre of the universe, an all- seeing celestial audience hungry for experience and information, its rawness as an “effect” only serving to underscore its emotional authenticity.

This relationship between the viewer and the observed played a similar role in Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project [2003] [Fig 4.66]. Designed for installation in the huge Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern museum in London the visual impact was similar to that of Lozano-Hemmer, but on a much larger scale. The art critic Richard Dorment described the work,

The Weather Project is, essentially, a vast optical illusion. As the visitor enters the building, he is confronted by what looks like a gigantic illuminated orange disc suspended from the ceiling at the far end of the hall. Discreetly placed humidifiers pump a mixture of sugar and water into the air to create a

196 fine mist. Seen through this soft haze, the light of the great disc is filtered and diffused so that it looks like the flaming ball of the setting sun [Dorment, 2003].

But the disc itself was an illusion created by an optical effect produced by a cleverly placed semi-circle of lights. On the roof of the Turbine Hall Eliasson had placed hundreds of small mirrors fractionally offset from one another where they were joined creating an effect that made “the edges at the upper (illusory) half of the great disc appear slightly jagged or uneven, which is what makes the ball of light look so uncannily like the sun” [Dorment, 2003].

Writing on The Weather Project art critic Susan May noted that “by relocating the phenomenon of the weather from the external environment into the gallery space, where fog drifts around the confines of the museum and cool breezes nip the skin, Eliasson sets the viewer adrift from the refuge of predicted conditions and the mediating force of the forecast” [May, 200:17]. It is in this sense of being cut adrift from the natural environment, where one experiences sunshine as a natural phenomenon, to a contained and ultimately theatrical experience of an idea of nature that the science fictional connection between Eliasson’s art work and the Tubbieverse is most profound. A number of writers and critics, when describing The Weather Project, cited The Truman Show [Weir, 1996], as a pop cultural reference point – another highly contained and “artificial” environment within a heliocentric system of observation. As Brain Britt observed,

The Teletubbies live in a sealed environment [...]. Like the artificial world of The Truman Show, Teletubbieland looks too good to be true, too colour- saturated to be natural, and I would bet that most kids who watch it realise this. Like the panopticon made famous by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, Teletubbieland is a world governed by the gaze: a smiling baby’s face, superimposed on the sun, looks down and giggles incessantly [Britt, 2004:14].

That the estimated 2 million people who visited the Tate Modern and were entranced by the sublime majesty of Eliasson’s work – and were moved to simply lie on the floor and observe their reflections on the Turbine Hall roof – is another astounding connection to the Tubbies and their ecstatic helplessness in the face of sublime hierophantic technology [2].

197

Fig 4.66 Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Turbine Hall, Tate Modern. Humidifiers, semi-circular disc, mono-frequency lamps, and mirror, various dimensions.

198 Tubbieverse and Context

The Tubbieverse is science fictional in its operation – and its setting is emblematic of numerous settings of recent science fiction film and literature. The isolated grasslands of their home seem to exist without limit: the occasional peek over the edge of the lip of the crater in which the Tubbytronic Superdome sits reveals nothing but green grass stretching to the horizon. In the episode Mark and Topus Po leaves on a journey on her red scooter over hills and valleys of green grass and flowers but, no matter how far she travels, the scenery never changes. At the end of this dispiriting excursion she returns to the Superdome dejected and tired. Scenes such as the ocean liner sequence are for the adult viewer, as Bignell observes, ‘otherworldly and mesmerizing’.

The action of most of the Teletubbies 338 episodes takes place within the confines of their immediate environment and concern play and adventure. But another marker of the Tubbieverse is how often the technology around the Tubbies malfunctions; the Noo-Noo is constantly cleaning up when the Tubbies’ food processor explodes, or dirt is trod into the home, or in one episode, Bluebells, the garden of the Tubbie home is plagued by the sudden materialisation of thousands of blue flowers. The problem of entropy and decay in the Tubbieverse appears constant, and the isolation of their world- a place far away in time and space - recalls the troubled walled cities and isolated zones of such varied films as The Truman Show, Children of Men [Cuarón, 2006], Zardoz [Boorman, 1974], Aeon Flux [Kusama, 2005] and Logan’s Run [Anderson, 1976] - places where the tension between dystopia/utopia and the isolated zone as a place of conservation/preservation/survival is the dynamic engine of their narratives.

This sort of conceptual tension is not restricted to science fiction films and can be found in a number of children’s programs, notably Lazy Town and Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom. In Lazy Town Stephanie lives in an isolated town surrounded by seemingly endless green fields [Fig. 4.67]. Watched over by the god-like Sporticus – a super- humanly fit exercise fanatic who lives in a circling dirigible – Stephanie and her friends in the laziest town on Earth do battle with the evil Robbie Rotten, an extremely sleep-deprived villain who spies upon the children with various Tubbie-like periscopes. Rotten tries to tempt the children with slothful activities such as watching

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Fig 4.67 Lazy Town. Dir. Magnús Scheving, Jonathan Judge and Steve Feldman et al. Lazy Town Productions 2005-2008. TV Series.

Fig 4.68 Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom. Dir. Neville Astley. Astley Baker Davies Ltd, 2009. TV series.

200 TV and eating cake as Sporticus rouses the kids to go outside and exercise. The unreality effect of Lazy Town is compounded by the fact that only the characters of Sporticus, Stephanie and Robbie are played by actors – the remainder of the cast, including Stephanie’s uncle, are portrayed by uncannily disturbing puppets. [3] Like the isolated city state of Bregna in Aeon Flux, the beleaguered Green Zone of inner London in Children of Men or the lingering immortals in the highlands of Zardoz, and indeed the pleasure palaces of the domed city in Logan’s Run, Tubbieland, like Lazy Town, is isolated from the world like a genetically manipulated Shangrila, a play world of ageless, perhaps immortal beings.

While the narratives of children’s television and SF are often set in imaginary lands, their real impact lies in the fact that they also feel familiar. In Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom a whole world exists in the grass and bushes of what might be someone’s backyard – a world of boy elves and girl fairies, of castles and tiny houses, a place where magic is performed with mechanical wands that periodically need repair in an underground service centre. Perhaps its mere coincidence then that one of the characters in Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom is a dog-like ladybug named Gaston, but then again, perhaps not. [Fig. 4.68]

In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard contemplates the nature of the miniature in fairy tales and fantasy fiction, suggesting that these miniature worlds and isolated zones are “false objects that possess a true psychological objectivity” [Bachelard, 1964: 148]. The miniature, according to Bachelard, presents a familiar reality that the reader/viewer interprets from the world in microcosm, a process that confers upon even the most bizarre and counterintuitive fiction elements of truth and audience recognition. “In order to enter the domain where we imagine,” writes Bachelard, “we are forced to cross a threshold of absurdity” an observation easily applied to the Tubbieverse [Bachelard, 1964:149]. But more importantly the relationship between reader/viewer and this fantasy of the miniature is an imaginative transaction that enables what Bachelard describes as a “particle of dream which could be handed from writer to reader.” [Bachelard, 1964:148].

201 Tubbieland Decline and Fall

The Teletubbie dietary requirements are serviced by one solid foodstuff and one liquid-based food, delivered from two dedicated dispensers. In the complex's operational heyday, these dispensers were capable of creating any food or drink through direct energy-matter conversion. The cataclysmic energies which damaged the dome scrambled the food-prep kernels of the devices, and they are now capable of creating nothing but a round cake-like solid with a smiling face imprinted on it ('Tubbietoast'), and a beverage so loaded with artificial additives that it is as thick as custard, and bright pink [...] which is responsible for many of the Teletubbies' characteristics; dilated pupils, hyperactivity, high metabolic rate, short-term memory loss and permanent goofy grin [Moose-spesh, moosespesh.com].

Bachelard’s survey of the miniature is marked by a frustration with his examples. He relates antique tales and stories where the author created worlds with incoherent rules, where time and space, cause and effect, are not observed with appropriate consistency. Yet the pleasure of the fantasy of the miniature world is produced as much by the reader/viewer as it is by the author/artist/filmmaker. The sense of “wonder” experienced within these fantasies is a component of the experience of cognitive estrangement, a confusion of interpretation shared by SF, fantasy and the fairy tale. This confusion, according to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. leads to a process of finding and interpreting patterns among the information, particularly when the narrative is centred on monstrous or aberrant figures.

In art, the combinations of [figures of the grotesque] usually involve style- markers indicating social position, conflating "the normative, fully-formed, 'high' or ideal, and the abnormal, unformed, degenerate, 'low' or material". The perceiver strives to discern a pattern in the jumble of disparate elements, some new explanation or matrix in which the pattern will appear harmonious and even necessary [Csicsery-Ronay, 2002:79].

The Teletubbies is an ambiguous experience for adult viewers – the temptation is to interpret its narrative and thematic architecture into known generic forms to, as Csicsery-Ronay Jr argues, find a harmonious and consistent explanation. And

202

Fig 4.69 Hqmarcos, Predator vs. Teletubbies, 2011.

203

Fig 4.70 Jesper and Madeleine, Untitled. N.D.

Fig 4.71 Moose-Spesh, Secret Footage/Ragdoll Secrets, N.D.

204

Fig 4.71 Moose-Spesh, Secret Footage/Ragdoll Secrets, N.D.

Fig 4.72 Andrew Parker, Over the hills and far away, Teletubbies' home is in disarray, The Sun, 29 July, 2002.

205 indeed, its non-target audience has found ‘new explanations’ in which the narrative pattern has a more logical, realist and often science fictional narrative.

Websites, discussion boards and chat groups bear witness to the varied reactions to the Teletubbies, and as the texts from online sources quoted here demonstrate, the temptation to reinterpret the Tubbies is irresistible, ranging from pseudo-religious narratives to excessively violent or inappropriately sexual reconfigurations of the otherwise innocent Tubbie characters. Four brief examples will serve to demonstrate the breadth of the online Tubby phenomenon. Brazilian illustrator Marcos Caldas posted a fan art mash up of the Teletubbies and the alien hunters from the Predator film series in which the loveable characters are eviscerated [Fig 4.69].

The neo-psychedelic band The Flaming Lips incorporated footage from the Teletubbies into their stage and light show during their 2008 international tour that included the key sequence of the Sun Face Avatar rising. Stage dancers and choir dressed in ersatz Tubbie costumes and so did some of their audience. Documentation of the fun was posted widely on Flickr [Fig 4.70]. Anonymous web poster “Moose-Spesh” concocted photo-shopped conflations of the Tubbies with Roswell alien autopsy photos and sightings of Big Foot [Fig 4.71]. In a final ignominy The Sun news reporter Andrew Parker and photographer Steve Copley gained access to the former set of the Teletubbies and published photos of the site in bad decline [Fig 4.72]. The utopian perfection of the Tubbieverse and the benign Tubbies themselves seems to unlock a desire in the adult to contort its world into a monstrous dystopia [4].

A Strange Sense of Our World

To reveal the connective line between Teletubbies and the science fictional one needs to separate the Tubbies from the intentions of their creators, and consider the resonant zone of science fiction as an embodiment of the post-structuralist conception of popular culture as “a library of texts which contradict, overlap, enrich and disempower each other — [the text] is a mixture of what Roland Barthes referred to as writer and readerly texts – accessible and easy in form but still open to a multitude of interpretations.” [Brzozowska-Brywcyynska, 2007:215]. The Teletubbies is a combination of entertainment and applied developmental psychology in the form

206 of a TV show aimed at very young children. Its producers offer no detailed explanation of setting or narrative incident beyond a cursory outlining of individual character’s defining props leaving the greater questions of why the program’s creators chose the details of its very specific setting open to interpretation and active imagining. [5] Whatever the intention, there is something of Bachelard’s “false object” that possesses a “true psychological objectivity” within the Teletubbies, a strange sense of our world and imagination reflected back to us in the innocent gaze of the part-human part-grotesque Tubbies, and within the Tubbieverse where time and space, cause and effect, are not observed with appropriate consistency. This sometimes maddening and strange inconsistency is where the magic lies and where the Tubbies rise from ciphers of educational intent into beings that co-habit the zone of the science fictional.

Notes

1. The “big dumb object” is a recurring trope particular to New Space Opera, see for example TV Tropes [TV Tropes, Big Dumb Object http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BigDumbObject] for five examples of the BDO in Banks’s SF novels and numerous examples of other NSO authors including Stephen Baxter and Alistair Reynolds.

2. This connection between the Tubbies and The Weather Project was noted by a number of critics and bloggers and made explicit at Art Kicks Ass: http://artkicksass.com/2010/03/22/olafur-eliasson-the-weather-project-animated/ Date Accessed June 21, 2011

3. TV critic and satirist Charlie Brooker memorably called the program a “Day-Glo atrocity” and suggested the bizarre relationship between the inhuman uncle and the flesh and blood Stephanie prompted a troubling question about the world’s “reproductive system that the program stubbornly fails to answer.” Charlie Brooker, Newswipe, Season 5, Episode 5, part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot2PidyggTg date accessed April 19, 2011.

4. The program is also infamous for provoking three moral panics – most famously the perceived ‘homosexuality’ of Tinky Winky for his habit of carrying a handbag

207 [See for example Adam Easton, ‘Poland Targets Gay Teletubbies’ BBC News, May 28, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6698753.stm and Michael Colton, ‘I’m Sorry, Tinky-Winky’, Salon, February 13, 1999, http://www.salon.com/news/1999/02/13newsb.html] and the interpretation of the Tubbieverse as a totalising and pernicious evil – see Eliot Bornstein, ‘Survival of the Catchiest: Memes and Postmodern Russia’, The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3, Special Forum Issue: Innovation through Iteration: Russian Popular Culture Today (Autumn, 2004), 467.

5. “Why does Tinky Winky carry a handbag? – Each Teletubby has a favourite thing, a ‘universal toy’ that reflects an aspect of children’s learning through playful exploration. Tinky Winky’s bag allows play with volume. Dipsy’s hat is for role- playing. Laa-Laa’s ball reflects young children’s fascination with spheres and Po’s scooter explores travel and direction.” Ragdoll Productions, “Teletubbies FAQ”, http://www.ragdoll.co.uk.

208 Studio Project

209

Science Fictional

6 Channel Installation: 5 x Blu-Ray Disc, HD Projection 16:9, 1 x 8 cm Digital Photo Frame, 4-Channel Stereo Sound, various durations, looped, 2012.

Image Source: Saturn and moons. Hubble Space Telescope. NASA YouTube Channel. Sound: Expanded radio static.

210

The Saturnian system contains 62 moons. Enceladus is the sixth largest at 500 kilometers in diameter. Expeditions by a series of probes in the early 21st century revealed strong indications that Enceladus contained liquid water beneath an ice crust with surface features including fissures, plains, corrugated terrain and other crustal deformations. Subsequent crewed missions confirmed the presence of an ocean and significant interior thermal range. With the discovery of extraterrestrial life a high mission priority, a descent through the ice was authorized.

Image Sources: Cassini Solstice Mission: Enceladus, NASA Raw file. Sound: Expanded radio static, Voyager Heliopause signal refraction, voice fragments, radio fragments.

211

Descent mission. Entry to the ocean through surface ice was affected by use of thermal rods, and the descent journey was without incident. Reports of an absolute and ‘intense’ darkness.

Image Source: Segments of Canada: Frontier Man, 1992. Sound: Elements of the Christmas carol I Saw Three Kings [traditional] performed by Harmonic Brass München, stretched approximately 40 times using St. Paul Stretch.

212

At 1,600 meters the first confirmed evidence of sub ocean activity was the discovery of ‘black smokers’ – a type of hydrothermal vent found on the seabed, typically in the abyssal and hadal zones...

Image Source: ‘Black Smokers Undersea’, YouTube, undated. Sound: Hydrophone recordings of passing ships, elements of the Christmas carol I Saw Three Kings [traditional], and fragments of sounds of solar radiation hitting Saturn’s ‘bow shock’ [the field where solar wind encounters the planet’s electromagnetic field].

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Large outcroppings of rock were encrusted with colonies of analogous white tubeworms, starfish and deep-water skates around Enceladus’s deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Archaea – microorganisms and bacteria – were detected in vast numbers – samples were taken.

Image Source: ‘Black Smokers Undersea’, YouTube, undated. Sound: Elements of the Christmas carol I Saw Three Kings [traditional], static.

214

Transmission temporarily lost <

Image Source: Camera original. East Coast, February 2012. Sound: Elements of the Christmas carol I Saw Three Kings [traditional], static.

215

Transmission temporarily lost <

Image Source: ‘Time Travel Sequence’, Time After Time [1979]. Sound: Elements of the Christmas carol I Saw Three Kings [traditional], voice fragments, solar radiation, static.

216

Large colonies of tubeworms were discovered and samples were taken. Crew made the return ascent.

217

The full importance of the discovery on Enceladus is yet to be determined. Analysis of the Archaea may reveal connections between Earth and extraterrestrial life.

Image Source: ‘Alien cell’ from Andromeda Strain [1971] Sound: Continues…

218

Image Source: Camera original, Formule 1 Hotel, and Riverside Plaza, West Gosford, May 2012. Sound: Elements of the Christmas carol I Saw Three Kings [traditional].

219

Image Source: Camera original, Formule 1 Hotel, Gosford, June 2012. Sound: Elements of the Christmas carol I Saw Three Kings [traditional].

220

Image Source: Camera original, Formule 1 Hotel, and Riverside Plaza, West Gosford, May 2012. Sound: Elements of the Christmas carol I Saw Three Kings [traditional] continues

221

Image Source: Sunrise from Phase IV [1974]. Sound: Continues to fade…

222

“Perhaps the SF of this era of cybernetics and hyperreality will only be able to attempt to "artificially" resurrect the "historical" worlds of the past, trying to reconstruct in vitro and down to its tiniest details the various episodes of by gone days: events, persons, defunct ideologies-all now empty of meaning and of their original essence, but hypnotic with retrospective truth” – Baudrillard.

Image Source: Gladiator [2000]. Sound: Fade out.

223 Science Fictional: Studio Project

Science Fictional is a six-screen video installation work. Composed as a collage of found and original visual material accompanied by an audio track that provides an overall sonic ambience, Science Fictional operates as an abstract narrative that embodies a number of aspects of the textual study.

Concept

An expedition to the Saturn system moon Enceladus has led to the discovery of alien life on the floor of its ice-covered ocean. News of this sensational discovery has been beamed back to Earth. A businessman in a hotel room watches the news unfold on a TV screen and, although the event is considered historically and culturally significant, life on Earth continues much as it always has done. In the businessman’s imagination, the distant moon is much like the cosmic gateway in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey or the sentient ocean in Solaris – and thoughts occur of what the alien microorganism might look like, and what effect it will have on future life on Earth.

Presented as five video projections and one wall-mounted digital picture frame, the work presents images that are both real – in that they are taken from documentary sources – and fictional – in that they are taken from science fiction cinema. The intention is that the audience, compelled to walk around the gallery space to view each of the screens, physically enacts the spatial relationship these fragments have within culture, the appropriated and original material working in cross-textual concert to produce a distinct science fictional aesthetic.

In one sense, the images have been expanded from their source context. Short sequences have been greatly extended; a 20 second shot now last for a minute and, through looping, lasts for many hours on screen. The intention is that the large, slowly alternating images attain a kind of iconic simplicity that is both powerful and affecting for the viewer.

224

Sound

The concept of expansion and collapse of cultural data is a central aesthetic component of the installation’s soundtrack. The desire was that the musical part of the soundtrack should in some way allude to this concept and so, as an anchoring point for the mix, the Christmas carol I Saw Three Ships [Come Sailing In], a traditional English song dating from the 17th century, was selected. This song was used in the Teletubbies episode Tropical Fish in which the four characters witness an incredible transformation – their distant world of green fields is magically becomes an ocean, upon which three ocean liners appear, then disappear over the horizon. Literally embodying this idea of expansion/collapse the song was an ideal accompaniment for Science Fictional.

The track itself was altered by running an MP3 of the song – a trumpet version by the group Harmonic Brass München – through a piece of freeware called St. Paul Stretch. The freeware slows down an audio file without changing its pitch, the degree of slowness determined by the user, from just a few percent slower to thousands of percent, effectively taking a short song and making it run for many days as elongated ambient notes apparently without end. The developer of St. Paul Stretch — St. Paul at The End of the World — specializes in slowing down songs by Kate Bush. His slow version of Bush’s Wuthering Heights runs for 33 minutes. The Harmonic Brass München version of I Saw Three Ships lasts for just one minute. The concept was to

225 have a soundtrack of slowly rising and falling notes and so, using the St. Paul Stretch, the track was expanded by a factor of 40.

This radically elongated version of I Saw Three Ships was then the basis of a collage of material that further complimented the concept of expansion and collapse. Taking MP3s of short wave radio recordings – recordings of sweeps across numerous short wave bands – and feeding them through St. Paul Stretch – small fragments of voice, music and static were expanded from a second or two to many minutes. Elements of these expansions were then edited and mixed together. Other elements were mixed into the collage to further compliment the theme of the images and to extend the listener’s sense of space. Recordings of radio-band transmissions from the Saturn system, sounds of solar radiation hitting Saturn’s ‘bow shock’ [the field where solar wind encounters the planet’s electromagnetic field], recordings of the deep space probe Voyager 1 leaving the solar system, and undersea recordings of passing ships on Earth, were combined. Finally, recordings of radio static – the audio resonance of the universe’s microwave background radiation – were selectively mixed and edited into the track. By using recordings of with various degrees of reverb, close-mic and distant sounds, clean and dirty sounds, slow and original speed recordings, the soundtrack is a key to the work’s overall conceptual content.

Imagery

Screen 1 – On entry to the gallery space the visitor sees a sequence that begins with two images that place the first location of the narrative. Two still images, the first of the rings of Saturn, and the second of Enceladus, are taken from NASA archives of the Cassini-Huygens mission. A slow tracking shot across both then cuts to a third archive image of the surface of the moon. The next shot is of a ‘space suited’ ocean diver descending through water. This sequence is taken from the documentary Canada: Frontier Man concerning the artist, diver and magician Phil Nuytten, the developer of the advanced diving suit. The following four shots are taken from YouTube footage of deep sea ‘black smokers’ – a type of hydrothermal vent found on the seabed, typically in the abyssal and hadal zones which, upon their discovery, provided clues to how life might exist in places where there is no sunlight, such as on the seabed of oceans believed to exist on the Jovian moon Europa, and the Saturn system moon Enceladus. The final image in the sequence is an ascent from Canada:

226 Frontier Man. This sequence is one of two montages that locate the work’s narrative within a specific location and space/time. Although nominally a simple assemblage of unrelated footage derived from multiple sources the montage prompts a narrative interpretation on the part of the viewer.

Screen 2 – The first image sequence is of Saturn shot from Earth orbit by the Hubble Space Telescope, taken from NASA footage uploaded to YouTube. The Hubble was designed to image distant stars and galaxies but due to its focal length imagery of the outer planets in our own solar system have the look of a compressed telephoto zoom. This shot alternates with a sequence of 20 frames taken from the Andromeda Strain [1971] that depicts an alien microorganism that has been inadvertently returned to Earth on a space probe. The two sequences together suggest the location of the alien life is Saturn or one of its moons.

Screen 3 –The first short sequence is taken from Time After Time [1979], a series of overlapping lights and colour effects that, in its original context, depicts a time traveller’s point of view as he travels from the past into the future. Dissolving over the next sequence – a single shot of the ocean taken from a high vantage point – the combined sequences have a distinct ‘out of time’ feeling, recalling traditional depictions of sublime subjects, but here combined with the abstraction of video and film effects.

Screen 4 – This sequence is comprised of original footage shot in and around a Formule 1 hotel. This is the key narrative sequence that connects the concept of outer space and alien life suggested in the accompanying sequences to the Ballardian space of the businessman’s hotel room, the foyer, car park and nightscapes of the surrounding concrete landscapes. Alternating between point of view shots and more detached coverage, the sequence is intended to connect a host of visual themes that recur through the work: flows [water, traffic, information], close and distant spaces and decentered and dislocated points of view.

Screen 5 – Projected on to a screen facing the room from the proscenium frame of the gallery’s stage area, this single shot is a radically extended sequence from the conclusion of the film Phase IV [1974], a Ballardian fiction concerning the sudden appearance of intelligence among ants. The final shot of the film – the slow rising of

227 the sun – compliments the footage of the ocean in Screen 3 – an image with associative power both sublime and abstract – and in the thematic continuity of the work as a whole, it provides the impetus for life. It is also a visual analogue to the sound of the Saturn bow shock and radio static.

Screen 6 – Situated behind and to the right of Screen 5, this sequence of still images is taken from a number of films that depict ancient Rome. It is a visual analog of Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that SF in the future [our present] is a matter of recreating defunct ideologies. This small screen is for the visitor to discover and is intended to pose a question – what is the status of the simulated image?

228 Conclusion

229 Mission > End

Final telemetry from our deep culture probe has been received. Images, text, and a variety of cultural objects – along with the detritus typically collected by its scanners like so much dust on a lens – must be sorted, collated and analyzed. The task is extensive, almost overwhelming, so we return to the basic principles of the mission.

Our proposition was that culture is a spatial experience: there is a sense of distance, from a relative ‘nearness’ of things to a sense of a cultural object’s temporal qualities – a sense of the distant past, to a time more recent, to something happening now, or even something that might occur in the future. Our experience of cultural space is that it has distinct dimensional qualities that are borne out in the subjective form of cultural objects.

The space between ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ is the cultural sphere of the study and the space where our probe explored and gathered its data. Inspired by the qualities of the ‘science fictional’ aesthetic, we set out to explore the locations, relationships and implications of the objects under scrutiny, the aim being to discover their origin and function. But it soon became clear that these cultural objects were not only present in cultural space, but were also present across time; that is, to unravel the aesthetic nature of these objects we would need to step back in time to trace their origin. Like many such studies, we soon discovered that our original aim was expanding exponentially – there might be no limit to the study, and that the mirage of certainty was giving way to the cold fear of limitlessness.

To belay this dread, we focussed the probe on the certainty of the centre – the genre of science fiction, the body of thought and analysis that exists around the corpus of its literature and film, of art and culture. We soon discovered that science fiction is an all-encompassing meta-genre, one defined by a combination of metaphor and analogy encoded in a realist language conjoined with elements of the fantastic. Although SF’s mode of address could be identified, our data showed that there is considerable debate about not only what constitutes SF’s limits, but also what constitutes its core. The certainty of the centre had evaporated.

The zone of SF proper gave way to the vast space of the science fictional as we discovered hundreds of cultural objects worthy of our attention. Our probe was

230 calibrated to measure three metaphorical states within these objects: reverberation, density and resonance. These were measures that enabled us to consider the relationships between cultural objects, their inter-connectedness, influence and persistence across time.

We found in reverberation the immaterial state of music, something that was seemingly anti-mimetic but was in fact a referent to the act of listening itself. Reverberation, which in music and sound has no individual property, but is only a measure of reflection, was found to have its own specific aesthetic qualities. We traced this effect in film soundtracks, in music production and audio art works, and concluded that, like our gossamer metaphors, it carried the idea while being both the idea and not.

The next stage of the probe’s journey was at first perilous. Drawn toward the incalculable density of a genre centre – the writing and art of J.G. Ballard – we discovered that to measure the science fictional we must account for its relationship to the generative core of a solid body of cultural thought. We considered how Ballard’s work articulated a very specific aesthetic response to the contemporary world, and charted the effect of his critical mass in the work of sculptors, photographers and video makers. Happily, the density of the Ballardian zone was merely a way station – a space station much like an airport – and so, after a brief period window shopping, browsing the concourse bookstores and buying noise- cancelling earphones – we set off on the next phase of the journey.

The resonant zone of the science fictional proved to be the most testing and challenging portion of the study. Time, as we had anticipated, was fluid. The past of cultural objects were affecting their present state, their present state was changing our understanding of their past — causality was confused. We dropped back through the fabric of cultural space into the late 18th and early 19th centuries, finding the roots of a visual language that was being reiterated across time, points in the 1850s, the early 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s – and then back into our own time with the work of contemporary video artists, minimalist painters, science fiction illustrators and advertising imagery. It was here we encountered truly strange alien life: four colour- coded creatures living a peaceful life far from harm, yet oddly connected to the watching audience, their every move analysed and repeated, harsh fantasies and corrupt ideologies re-interpreting their innocence as the stuff of SF, mimesis run wild.

231 At journey’s end the probe transmitted its final data packet before self-destructing.

We ponder the results of the study.

The dynamic of cultural space is simultaneously in a state of conflation and expansion, a sense of closeness and distance confused between something intimate – our minds – and something vast: interstellar space – an exchange within the zeugma that is vital to its operation. The only logical conclusion we can make is that it is not SF that is central to the cultural production of its aesthetic, but rather, the inverse: the zone of the science fictional feeds the genre for its continuing expansion. We have witnessed this process at every level and have seen the results play out across our screens.

What next? There has been discussion that the next stage of the study should be a manned mission into cultural space, that the imaginative metaphor of our probe must be replaced by the hands-on certainty of physical presence. There are many dangers to this next stage, not to mention the vast expense of putting human cargo into what is essentially just an idea. But the proposition is thrilling – we might venture further into the zone of reverberation to explore it as a metaphor for weightlessness. Sound has no ‘weight’, so we might find cultural objects that counter-intuitively embody an idea of weightlessness, disappearance and effacement. We could set up a base camp in the Ballardian way station and explore the aesthetic of transience in art, sound and music. In the resonant zone we might measure the longest waves of all – slow art that takes centuries to unfold. These are just ideas for now.

As the hotel room door closes the air seems to go with it —a long slow swoosh. Click, and then — shut.

Mission end.

232 Works Cited

233 Works Cited: Introduction

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238 Works Cited: “What’s Wrong?” Science Fictional Sound Space & Cultural Reverb

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239

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Aldiss, Brian W. “Introduction”. Science Fiction Art. London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976. Unnumbered.

270 Anderson, Ben. “A Principle of Hope: Recorded Music, Listening Practices and the Immanence of Utopia.” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 84, No. 3/4, Special Issue: The Dialectics of Utopia and Dystopia (2002): pp. 211-227.

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Ballard, J.G. “Airports: Cities of the Future”. Blueprint. Issue #42, September 1997. pp 26-29.

Ballard, J.G. “Which Way To Inner Space?” A User’s Guide to the Millennium. London: Picador, 1999. pp 187-210.

Banash, David. “Reading Baudrillard”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Mar., 2003), pp. 123-129.

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Hell of the Same”. The Transparency of Evil. London/New York: Verso. 1990 [1993]. pp 113-123.

Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Science Fiction”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, Science Fiction and Postmodernism (Nov., 1991), pp. 309-313. Baudrillard, Jean. “Xerox to Infinity”. The Transparency of Evil. London/New York: Verso. 1990 [1993]. pp 51-59.

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271

Beck, Bernard. “The Overdeveloped Society: THX 1138.” Film In Society. Arthur Asa Berger. New Brunswick: New Jersey. 1980. Pp 59-68.

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Beckman, Karen. “Film Falls Apart: ‘Crash’, Semen, and Pop”, Grey Room, No. 12 (Summer, 2003). pp. 94-115.

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Bignell, Jonathan “Familiar Aliens: Teletubbies and Postmodern Childhood”, Screen, Vol. 46, No.3, Autumn [2005]. pp 373-383.

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Bradbury, Ray. “Foreword: One Thousand Giant Steps for Mankind”, Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art, Vincent di Fate, London: Virgin Books, 1997. pp -6-9.

Bratlinger, Patrick. “The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Autumn, 1980). pp. 30-43.

Brian Britt, “The fall from Eden, critical theory, and The Teletubbies”, Culture and Religion, Vol. 5, No. 1, [2004]. pp 3-21.

Matt Briggs, “Beyond the Audience”, European Journal of Cultural Studies. 2006 #9. pp 441-457.

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Brzozowska-Brywcyynska, Maja, “Monstrous/Cute: Notes on the Ambivalent Nature of Cuteness”, Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Niall Scott, ed. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007. pp 213-225.

Clarke, David B., Doel, Marcus. A. “Engineering space and time: moving pictures and motionless trips”. Journal of Historical Geography 2005, #31. pp 41-60.

Collins, Jim. “When the Legend Becomes Hyperconscious, Print the...” Architecture of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age. London: Routledge. 1995. pp 125- 149.

Collins, Karen. “Dead Channel Surfing: the commonalities between cyberpunk literature and industrial music.” Popular Music (2005) Volume 24/2. (2005): Cambridge University Press. pp. 165–178.

Cholodenko, Alan. “Apocalyptic Animation: In the Wake of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Godzilla and Baudrillard”. Baudrillard West of The Dateline. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press. 2003. pp 241.

Colatrella, Carol. “Science Fiction in the Information Age”. American Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999). pp. 554-565.

Conner, James A. “Strategies for Hyperreal Travelers”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 69-79.

Consolmagno, Guy J. “Astronomy, Science Fiction and Popular Culture: 1277 to 2001 (And beyond)”, Leonardo, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1996). pp. 127-132.

Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Ronay. “Antimancer: Cybernetics and Art in Gibson's ‘Count Zero’”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 63-86.

Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Ronay. “Science Fiction and Empire.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, Social Science Fiction (Jul., 2003): pp. 231-245.

273 Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Ronay. “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, Science Fiction and Postmodernism (Nov., 1991): 387-404.

Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Ronay. “Review: Postmodern Technoculture or the Gordian Knot Revisited.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Nov., 1992), pp. 403-410.

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Diken, Bülent. “From refugee camps to gated communities: biopolitics and the end of the city”, Citizenship Studies, 2004, Volume 8, #1. pp. 83 — 106.

Doyle, Peter. “From ‘My Blue Heaven’ to ‘Race with the Devil’: echo, reverb and (dis)ordered space in early popular music recording.” Popular Music [2004] Volume 23/1. Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–49.

Doyle, Peter. “Harnessing the Echo”, Echo & Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960. Middletown Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. pp 38-63.

Easterbrook, Neil. “Alternate Presents: The Ambivalent Historicism of "Pattern Recognition", Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Nov., 2006). pp. 483-504.

Edwards, Malcolm J. “Hugo Gernsback”. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. John Clute & Peter Nicholls, eds. London: 1999 [2nd Ed]. p 490.

Engström, Timothy H. “The Postmodern Sublime?: Philosophical Rehabilitations and Pragmatic Evasions.” Boundary 2, Vol. 20. No. 2, [Summer 1993]. pp 190-204.

Evans, Arthur B. “Optograms and Fiction: Photo in a Dead Man's Eye.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Nov., 1993). pp. 341-361.

Farnell, Ross. “Posthuman Topologies: William Gibson's ‘Architexture’ in ‘Virtual Light’ and ‘Idoru’”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Nov., 1998). pp. 459-480.

274 Fischlin, Daniel, Hollinger, Veronica, Andrew Taylor et al. “’The Charisma Leak’: A Conversation with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Mar., 1992). pp. 1-16.

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Kelley, Mike. “In Conversation with Thomas McEvilley.” The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery/Cambridge Mass: The MIT Press, 2010. pp. 199-239. de Kerckhove, Derrick. “Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications” (1991), Leonardo, Vol. 24, No. 2. pp. 131-135.

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Leydon, Rebecca. “The Soft-Focus Sound: Reverb as a Gendered Attribute in Mid- Century Mood Music”. Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer, 2001): pp. 96-107.

Luckhurst, Roger. “Border Policing: Postmodernism and Science Fiction”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, Science Fiction and Postmodernism (Nov., 1991): pp. 358-366.

Luckhurst, Roger. “Found-footage science fiction: Five films by Craig Baldwin, Jonathan Weiss, Werner Herzog and Patrick Keiller.” Science Fiction and Television, 2008. Volume 1, #2. pp 193-214.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde.” The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991. pp 89- 107.

Mather, Philip. “Figures of Estrangement in Science Fiction Film.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jul., 2002): pp. 186-201.

McEvilley, Thomas. “Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart.” Sticky Sublime. New York: Allworth Press, 2001: pp 57-83.

McLeod, Ken. “Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music.” Popular Music, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Oct. 2003): pp 337-355.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Visual and Acoustic Space”, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York/London: Continuum Books, 2004. pp. 67-73.

Mul, Jos De. “Radical Romanticism”. Now Is The Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century. Rotterdam: Now Is The Time/NAi Publishers. 2009. pp. 167-175.

277

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Natali, Maurizia. “The Course of Empire: Sublime Landscapes in the American Cinema” in. Landscape and Film, ed. Lefebvre, Martin, 91-124. New York/London: Routledge, 2006. pp. 91-124.

Nicholls, Peter. “Chris Foss”. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. John Clute & Peter Nicholls, eds. London: 1999 [2nd Ed]. pp. 440-441.

Nicholls, Peter. “Illustration 2: 1978-1992”. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. John Clute & Peter Nicholls, eds. London: 1999 [2nd Ed]. pp 612-613.

O'riordan, Kate. “Human Cloning in Film: Horror, Ambivalence, Hope”, Science as Culture, 2008, Volume 17 #2. pp. 145-162.

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Palmer, Christopher, “Galactic Empires and the Contemporary Extravaganza: Dan Simmons and Iain M. Banks”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, (March 1999). pp. 73-90.

Porush, David. “The Architextuality of Transcendence.” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, Science Fiction and Postmodernism (Nov., 1991), pp. 323-325.

Reynolds, Simon. “Renegade Academia”, Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Paul D Miller, ed. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008. pp. 171-181.

278 Rossi, Umberto. “From Dick to Lethem: The Dickian Legacy, Postmodernism, and Avant-Pop in Jonathan Lethem's "Amnesia Moon”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 2002): pp. 15-33.

Ruddick, Nicholas. “Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, Nov., 1992. pp. 354-360.

Russ, Joanna. “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1975). pp. 112-119.

Rutledge, Gregory E. Futuristic Fiction & Fantasy: The Racial Establishment”, Callaloo, Volume 24, Number 1, Winter 2001. pp. 236-252.

Salisbury, Michel. “Michel Serres: Science, Fiction, and the Shape of Relation”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006), pp. 30-52

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Shey, Don. “30 Minutes with the Godfather of Digital Cinema.” Cinefex. Issue 65, March 1996. pp. 58.

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Suvin, Darko. “On Metaphoricity and Narrativity in Fiction: The Chronotope as the ‘Differentia Generica’” SubStance, Vol. 14, No. 3, Issue 48 (1986). pp. 51-67.

Svilpis, J.E. “Science-Fiction Magazine Illustration: A Semiotic Analysis”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, Nov. 1983. pp. 278-291.

Swope, Richard. “Science Fiction Cinema and the Crime of Social-Spatial Reality”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jul., 2002). pp. 221-246.

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285 Films & TV

2012. Dir. Roland Emmerich. Columbia Pictures/Centropolis Entertainment, 2009. Film.

Aeon Flux. Dir. Karyn Kusama. Paramount, 2005. Film.

American Graffiti. Dir. George Lucas. Lucas Film/Coppola Co./Universal, 1973. Film.

Another Earth. Dir. Mike Cahill. Artists Public Domain/Twentieth Century Fox, 2011. Film. Battlestar Galactica. Dirs. Michael Rymer, Michael Nankin, Rod Hardy et al. David Eick Productions/Universal Television, 2004-2009. TV series.

Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom. Dir. Neville Astley. Astley Baker Davies Ltd, 2009. TV Series.

Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Warner Bros./Ridley Scott Productions, 1982. Film.

Blindness. Dir. Fernando Meirelles. Rhombus Media/02 Filmes, 2008. Film.

Children of Men. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Universal Pictures, 2006. Film.

Citizen Kane, Dir. Orson Welles. Mercury Productions/RKO Radio Pictures, 1941. Film.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Film. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Columbia Pictures/EMI 1977. Film.

The Conquest of Space. Dir. Byron Haskin. Paramount Pictures, 1955. Film.

Contact. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Southside Amusement Company/Warner Bros. Pictures, 1997. Film.

286 The Day After Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. Twentieth Century Fox/Centropolis Entertainment, 2004. Film.

The Day The Earth Stood Still. Dir. Robert Wise. Twentieth Century Fox, 1951. Film.

Destination Moon. Dir. Irving Pichel. George Pal Productions Inc. George Pal, 1950. Film.

Donnie Darko. Dir. Richard Kelly. Flower Films, 2001. Film.

Ed Wood. Dir. Tim Burton. Touchstone Pictures, 1994. Film.

Flood. Dir. Tony Mitchell. Flood Productions/Muse Entertainment Enterprises, 2007. Telemovie.

Forbidden Planet. Dir. Fred M. Wilcox. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956. Film.

The Fountainhead. Dir. King Vidor. Warner Bros./ Henry Blanke, 1949. Film.

Idiocracy. Dir. Mike Judge. 20th Century Fox, 2006. Film.

Impostor. Dir. Gary Fleder. Dimension Films/Mary Katz Productions/Mojo Films, P.K. Pictures, 2001. Film.

Independence Day. Dir. Roland Emmerich. Twentieth Century Fox/Centropolis Entertainment, 1996. Film.

John Carter. Dir. Andrew Stanton. Disney, 2012. Film.

Judy, Frank and Dean: Once in a Lifetime. Dir. Norman Jewison. Famous Artists Productions Ltd, 1962. TV Special.

Knowing. Dir. Alex Proyas. Summit Entertainment, 2009. Film.

Logan’s Run. Dir. Michael Anderson. MGM, 1976. Film.

287 Mars Attacks! Dir. Tim Burton. Tim Burton Productions/Warner Bros. Pictures, 1996.

The Matrix. Dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski. Village Roadshow Pictures/Warner Bros. 1999. Film.

Monsters. Dir. Gareth Edwards. Vertigo Films, 2010. Film.

La nuit américaine. Dir. François Truffaut. Les Films du Carrosse, 1973. Film.

Planet of The Apes. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. 20th Century Fox, 1968. Film.

Prince of Darkness. Dir. John Carpenter. Alive Films/Larry Franco Productions, 1987. Film.

Primer. Dir. Shane Carruth. Palisades/Tartan Video. 2004. DVD.

A Scanner Darkly. Dir. Richard Linklater. Warner Independent Pictures/Thousand Words/Section Eight/Detour Filmproduction/3 Arts Entertainment. 2006. Film.

Screamers. Dr. Christian Duguay. Allegro Films/Fries Film Group/Fuji Eight Company Ltd/Triumph Films, 1995.

Sleeper. Dir. Woody Allen. United Artists, 1973. Film.

Star Trek. Dirs. Marc Daniel, Joseph Pevney, Vincent McEveety, et al. Desilu Productions/Norway Corporation/Paramount Television, 1966-69. TV Series.

Star Trek. Dir. J.J. Abrams. Paramount Pictures/Spyglass Entertainment/Bad Robot et al, 2009. Film.

Star Wars [aka Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope]. Dir. George Lucas. Lucas Film/Twentieth Century Fox, 1977. Film.

Superstorm. Dir. Julian Simpson. Michael J. Mosely./BBC Worldwide, 2007. Miniseries.

288 Supervolcano. Dir. Tony Mitchell. Big Blast Productions/BBC, 2005. Telemovie.

Teletubbies. Dir: Paul Gawith, Vic Finch, Andrew Davenport, et al. Ragdoll Productions, 1997-2001. TV Series.

Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Dir. Robert Ward, George Gould et al. Rockhill Productions/CBS/ABC/NBC/Du Mont Television, 1951-53. TV Series.

Total Recall. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Carolco Pictures, 1990. Film.

The Truman Show. Dir. Peter Weir. Paramount Pictures, 1998. Film

The Thing From Another World. Dir. Christian Nyby. Winchester Pictures, 1951. Film.

THX 1138. Dir. George Lucas. American Zoetrope/Warner. Bros, 1971. Film.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Film. Dir. David Lynch. New Line Cinema, 1992.

2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. MGM/Stanley Kubrick Productions, 1968. Film.

War of The Worlds. Dir. Byron Haskin. Paramount Pictures, 1953. Film.

The Wizard of Oz. Film. Dir. Victor Fleming. Mervyn LeRoy. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor, 1939.

Zardoz. Dir. John Boorman. John Boorman Productions, 1974. Film.

Music

Baxter, Les. Music Out of the Moon. Universe, [Digital Download 1947], 2012.

Baxter, Les. Space Escapades. El Records. Digital Download, [1958]. 2012.

Czukay, Holger. Moving Pictures. Alpha Records. CD, 1993.

289

Czukay, Holger. On The Way To The Peak of Normal. EMI. Album, 1981.

Czukay, Holger. Radio Wave Surfer. Virgin, Album, 1991.

Czukay, Holger. Rome Remains Rome. Virgin. Album. 1987.

Esquivel. Other Worlds, Other Sounds. Master Classics Records [1958], 2011.

Free The Robots. Ctrl. Alt. Delete. Alpha Pup Records, 2010.

Garcia, Ross. Fantastica: Music from Outer Space. Album. Capitol Records, LLC, 1958.

Henke, Robert. Layering Buddha. Imbalance Computer Music. Digital Download, 2006.

Henke, Robert. Signal To Noise. Imbalance Computer Music. Digital Download, 2004.

Kubisch, Christina. Five Electrical Walks. Important Records. CD, 2007.

Kubisch, Christina. La Ville Magnétique / The Magnetic City. Ville De Poitiers. CD, 2008.

Kubisch, Christina. Magnetic Flights. Important Records. CD, 2011.

Simonsound, The. Reverse Engineering. First World Records, 2010.

Toop, David. Hot Pants Idol. Digital Download. Barooni , 1997.

Toop, David. Pink Noir. Digital Download. Virgin, 1996.

Toop, David. Screen Ceremonies. Digital Download. The Wire Editions, 1995.

290 Toop, David. Spirit World. Digital Download. Virgin, 1997.

Toop, David. Digital Download. 37th Floor at Sunset: Music for Mondophrenetic™. Sub Rosa. 2000.

291