By Carter Kaplan
Wave IX
J.G. Ballard’s story “Studio 5, The Stars” appeared in Science Fantasy magazine in 1961. The story is set in “Vermilion Sands”, a desert art colony suggesting the post-war “hothouse” desert compounds created in the American Southwest by painters like Max Ernst and Georgia O’Keefe. In Ballard’s Vermillion Sands, art, artists, poetry and landscape blend in remarkable ways, and the possibility of elements of virtual reality appear to be an operative dynamic, though this possibility remains unexplained, or anyway is deliberately obscured to enhance the futuristic feel of the community, and as well represent the confusion that should properly attend a world that is in contact with computers, simulation, and muddled human perceptions. The setting is thus an opportune field for blending a broad—indeed unlimited—range of aesthetic figures and themes. The plot follows the adventures of Paul Ransom, editor of the poetry magazine Wave IX. He is beset by submissions of bad writing (fragments in the form of computer tapes are often floating through the sky above Vermilion Sands). The poetry is produced by computers styled as Verse Transcribers or VT’s. The stale submissions form a point of departure for exploring the subject of poor writing, and how the production of poor writing is driven by complacency, intellectual laziness, cliché, formulae, cultural homogenization, stale involvement, theoretical strictures, official channelings, academic repetition, market forces, fossilized traditions, and so on.
Jean-Paul L. Garnier, the editor of Wave IX the book before us, presented Ballard’s story to the contributors and asked for submissions. There were very little instructions; contributors were simply encouraged to follow their inspiration. A variety of graphic images, poems and fictions were submitted. Here is a review of these pieces, followed by suggestions for further exploration and discussion. I am a contributor to the project, as described below.
“The In-Between Sea” by Jonathan Neviar
Nevair’s piece underscores the notion that plot can be incidental to the meaning of a story—itself a fascinating but subsidiary facet to the story. More importantly, here we observe a confrontation, or grappling, with the existential “edge” of the call to create. A writer leaves cryptic messages to himself, exposing the line between the inspiration to write but then not writing, thus viewing from a number of perspectives the problem of artistic frustration and missed opportunities.
“Colors in the Air” by F. J. Bergmann
This eight-stanza poem revisits various themes associated with Ballard; an illustration of a society of packaging, trademarks, market-driven aesthetics, constant consumer feedback loops, industrialized cultural manufacture, subliminal (as well as mechanized or physical) product distribution…
“A Beautiful Paean” by Eugen Bacon
In this short story incorporating a number of verse pieces, Bacon presents a conflation of popular sports, video games, artificial reality, news, and other cultural markers. The protagonist downloads a new app to his phone, perpetuating a cascade of crises and frightening revelations that are expressed though the medium of his digital hobbies (games, etc.). These revelations come in the form of AI-generated poems that emerge or “project” from his devices and superimpose upon his physical environment.
“Concentrate 1” by Michael Butterworth
An artifact of the late-60s, Butterworth’s story is an example of the “compressed” writing championed by Ballard, as well incorporating incongruities in narrative suggestive of the “cut-ups” method associated with William S. Burroughs. The dystopian world presented in the story is cleverly expressed through the antic deployment of sensations, impressions and deceptions, all of which represent in the story the confusions that have displaced mid-20th century British society, evidently in the wake of some cataclysm or political revolution. Butterworth’s story “works” by exercising vague semiotic signals suggesting a narrative in the midst of a historical disruption that has fractured traditional cultural and ethical epistemologies. In one passage, the source of the fractured social-psychology is cryptically characterized as a takeover or invasion by the “War Agoraphobia Maniacs.” Although insufficient, the phrase serves both to explain the character of the society, as well suggesting such explanations are mere “signals”, moreover signals signifying the presence of the form of a narrative without actual substance. In a footnote, Butterworth explains the story was edited by J.G. Ballard. “Concentrate 1” first appeared in New Worlds # 174, August 1967.
“The Nanopoetic Quest in Theory and Practice” by Carter Kaplan
Returning to Ballard’s theme of a frustrated editor engaged with machine-produced literature, this story mixes themes of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and societal change. The story launches from mid-20th century high-modern culture—minimalist homes framed by glass walls, breeze blocks and cantilevered roofs, post-war hedonism, eager cultural energy, swinging literary parties, “heroic” Hollywood filmmakers, plush desert living (reflecting Palm Springs, or maybe the desolation of Walter Pidgeon’s inward-looking obsessions in Forbidden Planet), Calder mobiles, primitivist sculpture, a dynamic “culture industry” entertaining the masses, Freud, Fellini, Nabokov, Frank Sinatra, the elevation of a sometimes shallow but always intelligent “jazz consciousness” to the level of a national aesthetic… The trajectory from 1950s optimism to 21st century nihilism is suggested, meanwhile a range of philosophical and aesthetic themes are exercised as a nod to Ballard’s story and the quest to identify good writing amongst a “slush pile” of cliché understanding, academic constraints, bureaucratic weariness, aesthetic programming, political bullying, hack ethics, cauterized sensitivity, and stale language.
In responding to editor Garnier’s prompts and the theme of the project, I shot from the hip. The story is an exercise in extemporization, notwithstanding the tight plotting. An eye for maintaining verisimilitude coupled with experience in life will perforce drive a viable narrative structure. Ergo, “stumbling upon” and then inventing a narrator who is an editor drove both the plot and the language of the narrative. The sequence of absurd characters representing a range of serio-comic perspectives on AI and art was informed by my experience in academe and editing, as well as my taste for satire and surrealism.
“Semiautomatic Songs” by Charles Platt
Here are two sets of poems generated by algorithms specifying the manipulation of letters and lines. In effect, these are “programmed texts” (my term, see “Discussions” below). Platt wrote a computer program to test the generative properties and linguistic textures of the concept. The rules for these programed texts are as follows; Platt writes:
- Each word consists of four letters.
- Each word differs from the previous word by only one letter.
- No word can be repeated—but,
- The last word must be the same as the first word.
Here, following this algorithm, is a section of the poem “Hope”:
hope you
dope and
doze in
daze you…
There are four poems following this routine; the final three poems follow similar rules, but employ five-letter words. Although “nonsensical,” Platt observes that when read aloud the staccato rhythm of the poems “gives them a funny denunciatory quality. They also have the sense of almost meaning something, but not quite” (55).
The poems are followed by two visual arts collage pieces by Platt suggesting the themes of the grotesque and disenchanted sexuality associated with Ballard’s work (see, for example, The Atrocity Exhibition). The collages first appeared in New Worlds #197, January 1970.
“Double Tongue” by Jardine Libaire
Libaire’s story explores the place of commercialized AI in a vaguely decaying-yet-functional culture. Politically, society has passed through a civil disturbance of some kind—the “CC” or “Civil Conflict.” In the wake of the CC, traditional connections between people have become superficial and lacking commitment. It is a polity of nominally-educated lower-middle-class clerks, cogs in a rudderless corporate machine. In terms of the Woodstock generation’s academic brigade of absurd guerilla theoreticians and tweedy revolutionaries, it is the celebrated utopia of Postmodernism tra la, indeed. A wasteland of ethical and aesthetic entropy, it is a psychological space explored in much of Ballard’s writing. After breaking up with his lover, the protagonist seeks solace in writing at a drug-and AI-driven virtual reality clinic. The store-front clinic is a disturbing reflection of contemporary out-patient medical clinics in shopping centers that have replaced traditional hospitals for the “distribution” of medical services, which the MBA types (and their Hegelian “follow-the-science” minions in the Humanities and Social Sciences) regard as “products” and “functions.” The clinic, Feel-Real, offers a number of experiences intended as therapy and recreation. The protagonist choses a virtual reality treatment that enhances his ability to write, and he is liberated from the emotions and transformations that should attend his break-up. The treatments are addictive and dehumanizing, however, and lead to spasms of physical pain, schizophrenic breaks and violent impulses. Reflecting upon the protagonist’s “journey”, it is to be observed that pursuing art and writing is not always a healthy therapy for dealing with life’s disappointments. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“A Short History of Parking Structures” by Mark Soden, Jr.
Soden’s piece is an essay exploring the advent of the parking garage and how, driven by suburban developments, it has enabled the reconfiguration of city centers. Following the shift to the automobile and suburb, there has been a dissolution into a psychological space that is surreal and dehumanized; again, a subject explored by Ballard. The sterile and plain photographs of parking structures by Jaques Garnier are as interesting as they are banal, much like the cultural spaces Soden is describing. This piece is accompanied by an on-line audio piece by “Phog Masheeen” [https:/tinyurl.com/P-Structure], which is a reading of the text.
Art and photographs by Jean-Paul L. Garnier, Aaron Sheppard, Charles Platt and Jacques Garnier.
There is much to remark on the book’s graphic pieces, and these are best left for the reader to explore. I shall highlight, however, J-P. L. Garnier’s collage piece “Faces of Ballard” that employs a clever superpositioning of images of Ballard’s countenance interposed with circular figures and a grid lattice that produce intriguing Op-Art effects.
Discussions
Virmilion Sands
“Studio Five, the Stars” is collected in Vermilion Sands (1971), a series of fiction pieces set in a desert resort (vaguely suggesting Palm Springs but possibly set off-world) where eccentric artists and various hangers-on pursue their projects. The science fiction aspects of the collection are vague and unexplained, and they are subordinate to the psychological investigations and surreal aesthetics that concern Ballard. Each story focuses on a different artistic medium; their technological enhancements pose interesting and important possibilities, but the technology chiefly serves to bring hyperbolic magnification to traditional aesthetic issues. Here are the stories and their aesthetic subjects:
- “Prima Belladonna” – music, especially singing
- “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista” – architecture
- “Cry Hope, Cry Fury” – painting
- “Venus Smiles” – sculpture
- “Studio 5, The Stars” – poetry
- “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” sculpture and painting
- “Say Goodbye to the Wind” – fashion, “sound jewelry”; non-aural music and erotic food also get mentions.
- “The Screen Game” – jewels and screens
- “The Singing Statues” – sound sculpture
Dr. Christopher Evans
J. G. Ballard’s friendship with computer scientist Christopher Evans is a significant subject. Evans was in the vanguard of computer experimentation and how it related to the human mind, and he was an influence upon Ballard in many ways. According to Wikipedia:
Evans had a significant friendship and collaboration with the writer J. G. Ballard. Together around 1968 they developed ideas for a play about a car crash, offered to the Institute of Contemporary Arts but not produced. Later came an exhibition of crashed cars at The New Arts Lab in London in 1970, and ultimately Ballard’s novel Crash, published in 1973. Evans’ charismatic appearance as a “hoodlum scientist” (in Ballard’s description) was an inspiration for the character of Dr. Robert Vaughan in Crash. Evans also appears in Ballard’s fictionalised life story The Kindness of Women as the psychologist Dr. Richard Sutherland. (Ballard recounts his friendship with Evans in his autobiography Miracles of Life.)
Evans was not a contact in 1961, when Ballard published “Studio 5: The Stars.” Their friendship, however, is clearly of significance, and the subject should be pursued, both in understanding Ballard and in assessing Garnier’s Wave IX project. Students of this subject will want to find the computer-generated poems Evans published in New Worlds in the late-60s.
Programmed Texts
The third section of my book Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology is titled “The Synoptic Analysis of Programmed Texts.” The first chapter in this section, “The Advent of Literary Dystopia” surveys dystopian literature, investigating how various elites (otherwise “influencers”) engineer texts and cultural narratives as a function of authoritarianism and political hegemony, which, like the narratives, become systemic and programmed into our institutions and culture. In “The Edge of Capital”, the second chapter of this section, I explore computer modeling in theoretical biology, and describe some instances of these theories and models being applied in the fields of economics, finance, and politics. In the final chapter of this section, “Scaling up to the Homeric Question: The Aesthetics of Chaos, Complexity, and Cosmogenesis”, I explore the aesthetics of Chaos Theory and Complexity Science as phenomena of computer modeling, the production of art and artifacts, and AI. Charles Jencks’ cosmological writings and Michael Moorcock’s Second Ether trilogy provide material and examples for examining these concepts in detail.
Computers, Art, and a New Dada in a Story by Brian W. Aldiss
“As for Our Fatal Continuity” by Brian W. Aldiss (New Worlds Quarterly Three, 1972) is a story about a writer (Dayling) who produces computer-generated literature. Sometimes Aldiss’s language suggests that the story itself could be—conceptually, in the fictional world of the story—a computer-generated text. Here is the gloss from my book Critical Synoptics:
[The story is] a parodic artist biography from a fictious textbook entitled Sculpting Your Own Semi-Sentients: A Primer for Girls and Boys by Gertrude Slayne Laboratories. Dayling, whose works are titled after the death bed utterances of famous authors and statesmen, is the artist whose biography forms the substance of the story, which concludes:
In may be, as Torner Mallard has claimed, that these final works of Dayling’s mark the demise of a too-long sustained system of aesthetics going back as far as Classical Greece, and the beginning of a new and more biologically-based structure; certainly we can see that in the Dadist titles, as well as the works themselves, Dayling was undergoing a pre-post-modernist purgation of outworn attitudes, and carrying art forward from the aesthetic arena of balance and proportion to the knife-edge between existence and non-existence.
In his reckless sweeping away of all the inessential props of life, Dayling—by which of course we mean Dayling-and-art-computer—takes the bone-bare universe of Samuel Beckett a stage further; humor and death contemplate each other across a tumbled void. Only the grin of the Cheshire Cat is left, fading above Valhalla.
(Critical Synoptics 41)
It is not difficult to conceive that Aldiss is writing about Ballard, or about the world depicted in “Studio Five, the Stars”, or the pieces (and the authors) in Wave IX.
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Carter Kaplan has pioneered the application of poetry and fiction to the study of analytic philosophy, as presented in his book Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology. He is the author of the Aristophanic comedy Diogenes, and a novel of intellectual life in trans-Atlantic culture, Tally-Ho, Cornelius! His Afterword appears in the International Authors edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and he led the committee producing the International Authors translation of Torquato Tasso’s Creation of the World. His Invisible Tower trilogy is now available: Echoes, We Regin Secure, and The Sky-Shaped Sarcophagus. He is Editorial Director of International Authors and editor of the annual arts and literature anthology Emanations.
© Copyright 2025 Carter Kaplan
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