COLOSSEUM SERIES

In the late 1950s, JG Ballard created a series of literary collages titled Project For A New Novel. He folded in scientific reports, company brochures and advertising leaflets (what he called ‘invisible literature’) with written exercises in free association to create a surrealistic concoction of cryptic narratives.

Although never realised, Ballard had imagined his experiments as billboards all across London. Both mesmerised and appalled by the power of advertising and its manipulation of the unconscious mind he sort to subvert it with surrealism. He followed the surrealist painters in believing that the world could be remade by the human mind, something he described as ‘the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible’. Much like William Burroughs before him, Ballard would manipulate language, twisting it out of shape to try to get to something unconscious, something truthful about our lived experience. Declan Lloyd writes in The Guardian:

While most billboard ads focus on quick-fire bursts of information, eye-catching imagery and memorable phrases, Ballard inverted this process: stripping them of image in favour of text, and making the message wilfully inscrutable. In doing this he urged the viewer, the consumer, to formulate their own subjective narrative through these fragmentary collages, thus empowering the consumer and reinvigorating the imagination.

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Tim Fishlock, January 2021