PUBLIC LECTURE: J.G. Ballard: Cars, war, text and images

To drive is to connect with a complex system - the broader technological landscape of the modern world. For British writer J.G.Ballard, driving is the activity that most emphatically constitutes the modern subject and his scientific method investigates the car as though it were the drosophila of the technological kingdom. It has entered all aspects of our quotidian lives, from the trivial to the most dramatic. It is a key to memory, desire, death and sex. Images that connect the iconography of the Cold War to extracts from Ballard's writing will provide a visual ground for this talk by Pippa Tandy. She will investigate Ballard's representation of the car as exemplar of technology's impact on humanity, the architectonics of its material presence, and the ways in which his mental landscapes reveal a correspondence between the landscape of the motorway and the 'dark causeways of our spinal columns'. Pippa Tandy is Head of English at Perth College, WA. She has a particular interest in the Cold War and its technologies, and in the writing of J.G. Ballard.

This lecture is part of the public program for 'CRASH (and other worldly pleasures)' at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery from 12 February to 29 March.