In JG Ballard’s short story collection, Vermillion Sands there is a story titled The Screen Game, in which a filmset is created to support the illusions and delusions of an aging actress, named Emerelda Garland. Aphrodite 80 unfinished casts her as a composite of past actresses to feature in a version of the film that is abandoned in the story. The ‘film set’ exsists as moving collages using fragments and devices from off the peg software from and for social media - experimenting with looping action and animated gifs in an infinite present. Ballard’s visual imagination, rooted as it is in surrealism and pop, feels more and more like the odd simultaneously inter-connected and disconnected online experiences we use and share. In finding a visual form, I was thinking about how Ballard talked about his writing: ‘… it's rather like a film, where the action is suddenly overlaid by another image, just briefly, and one's conscious of a different system of time, perhaps a more dream-like atmosphere, something that touches another level of the mind.’
An article about ‘Aphrodite 80’ (Unfinished) for Garageland 23 ‘Living British Cinema’ can be read here
