Christchurch photography by Simon Sellars. This piece was written in April 2011 and originally published in October 2011 as the Afterword to Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe, eds Andrew Milner, Simon Sellars and Verity Burgmann (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2011). TWO OBSERVATIONS While this volume was being prepared, the Tohoku earthquake hit northern Japan. [...]

Cover of Obelisk i inne eseje (2009), a Polish translation of Bey’s essays. Hakim Bey: Repopulating the Temporary Autonomous Zone, by Simon Sellars. Originally published in Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Volume 4, Number 2, 2010, pp. 83-108. The poet and essayist Peter Lamborn Wilson is widely known for his anarchist manifesto “The Temporary [...]

by Simon Sellars This is an earlier version of an article published in Continuum, Volume 24, Issue 5 October 2010, pages 721-33. Both versions were based on a paper given by Simon Sellars at the Monash University conference, B for bad cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value. Recent academic discussions of ‘badfilm’ and ‘paracinema’ have [...]

Photography by Simon Sellars. 37° 40′ 60S, 144° 56′ 60E Originally published in Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks, Katrina Stoll & Scott Lloyd (eds), Berlin: Jovis, 2010. In the built environment, the ‘edgelands’ describes the interfacial interzone between urban and rural, a mix of rubbish tips, superstores, office parks, rough-hewn farmland, gas towers, electricity [...]

Landing Sites from Simon Sellars on Vimeo. This short film is based on the ‘reversible destiny’ theory of the architects/conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins: reversibledestiny.org. I made it for a seminar I taught at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University, which attempted to weave connections between mythogeography/psychogeography and Arakawa and Gins. Results from the [...]

Images by Michelle Lord, from Future Ruins (inspired by JG Ballard’s ‘The Ultimate City’), 2008. ‘Pulled apart by the elders, many of the sets revealed their internal wiring. The green and yellow circuitry, the blue capacitors and modulators, mingled with the bright berries of the firethorn, rival orders of a wayward nature merging again after [...]

One of the more enduring misconceptions surrounding the work of J.G. Ballard is that it operates in the classical dystopian narrative mode, [1] supposedly mining pessimism, repression and the negativity of a post-industrial age.

This represents the first academic article I had published, back when I was attempting my PhD for the first time. It was actually written in 1996 and delivered at the Speaking Science Fiction conference organised by the University of Liverpool, but remarkably the edited collection of conference papers wasn’t published until four years later. Originally [...]