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glasgow | gsa postgrad

[oblivion-soave]

“Don’t let your mind set limits that aren’t really there.”

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Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel. The motorway is a ghostly place, a skewed natural force, restless as if it was once alive but it was dead first. 

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“Ballard was in the business of taking what seems "natural" – what seems normal, familiar and rational – and revealing its psychopathology...In Ballard the dystopia is not hidden under anything. Nor is it (as with so many fictional dystopias) a vision of the future. It is not the subtext. It is the text.”

Sex and wheels: Zadie Smith on JG Ballard's Crash

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GLASGOW TODAY AND TOMORROW again, but featuring unissued/unused material. “Selected scenes from newsreel story in Gazette issue in 49/24. Date given on old record is 21/03/1949.”

These stills show the model of modern Glasgow in Kelvin Hall, as part of the exhibition that shared its name with the film. ‘Workmen’ walk over and around it, curious giants crossing bridges and placing vegetation as if it spilled from their fingers. They step between the inkblot trees, crouch down between the tower blocks. The Glasgow of Tomorrow is beneath our feet, reducible to the naked eye, measurable, definable, malleable. Transformation is at our fingertips.

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"One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set … the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it … could be dismantled overnight."

J.G. Ballard quoted in ‘Sex and wheels: Zadie Smith on JG Ballard's Crash’

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"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind … We live inside an enormous novel … The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent reality."

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“This was taken within 10 minutes of the city centre. A father and mother, and three kiddies, living in one room, sleeping in one bed. Glasgow Tomorrow must see the elimination of all this.”

from GLASGOW TODAY AND TOMORROW

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Stills from GLASGOW TODAY AND TOMORROW (1949), directed by Erica Masters. Sponsor: Planning Committee of The Corporation of Glasgow; Production Company: Moviegram Films; Running time: 7.57 mins. 

B R E A T H I N G  S P A C E

National Library of Scotland - Moving Image Archive

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MIEKE BAL on Five Principles of Cultural Analysis

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POSSESSION 

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I think I grow tensions like flowers in a wood where nobody goes. Each wound is perfect, encloses itself in a tiny imperceptible blossom, making pain. Pain is a flower like that one, like this one, like that one, like this one.

The Flower | Robert Creeley 

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Solaris Motorway Scene

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Phantasy Poster

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Taking text from Barthes’ Enamel essay and playing with typography

[days-of-reading]

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

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Zine Project - Operation Breakthrough 1988