Text by Piotr Bockowski
A report from ‘Terminal Futures: JG Ballard in the 21st Century’ conference
On Sunday afternoon 17th May, a Hong Kong performer, Lee Fung, crashed their bicycle by riding into the River Thames in Shepperton, just outside London. It was the final day of Terminal Futures: JG Ballard in the 21st Century conference, organised at Kingston University and dedicated to the iconic science fiction writer who lived for nearly half a century in the suburb of Shepperton, where he wrote all of his twenty books and over a hundred short stories.
In his fantasy of excessive mutation, The Unlimited Dream Company, JG Ballard crashes a stolen aircraft into the River Thames just a minute cycle outside of his Shepperton house. What follows is a description of posthuman materialist insight into the undoing of the material reality, not only through biological recapitulation of reptilian evolutionary past, but also dissolution into alternative evolutionary possibilities of flying bodies or distributed intelligence and debauchery of energetic circulations within the biosphere. Fung Lee’s reckless bike performance was a rapturous attempt to embody the primordial entity discovered by the writer within human bodies of Shepperton inhabitants: the Ballardian fish-bird.
An ecstatic “environmental disaster” of riverside flight crash, enacted by the bicycle ride of Lee Fung, generates a life-affirming biogenetic metamorphosis of Ballard’s world that mutates his Shepperton suburb into a wild fantasy of environmental and corporeal metamorphosis. Residents dive in the Thames and transform into fish or other aquatic life forms; then fly away as bird creatures. The crash triggers frenzied sexual fetishism aroused by the entire suburban environment. Crash into the river Thames animates pansexual environmental promiscuity that accelerates tropical overgrowth and cross-mutation with earlier forms of evolution, indulging in devolution into a prehistoric flying fish.
Cycling of Lee Fung recapitulates the circulation of Ballardian fish-bird around the Shepperton suburb and its obsessive ejaculation all over, with the aim of copulating with the town itself and transforming it into the most exotic form of life. The cannibal desire of flying fish is desperate to mate with all creatures and absorb them into a devolutionary orgy within, abandoning genital organs in the act of direct merger with the primal vitality. The spread of flying fish semen spawns an equatorial jungle. As it transplants organs of people and animals into its body, hybrid corporeality grows plants as well as some bizarre fungus.
Unlimited Dream Company of JG Ballard, animated by Lee Fung’s bicycle crash, narrates an ecstatic “environmental disaster” that originated from the crash of an aircraft stolen from Heathrow airport and drowned in the River Thames by the novel’s protagonist, Blake. Named after London visionary poet William Blake, the protagonist inspired Lee Fung to merge with the suburb’s environment, mutating into different species through the frenzied enactment of an extinct fish-bird by Lee Fung during their failed flight attempt.
Reinvented as Lee Fung’s bicycling, Ballardian riverside crash triggered restless, self-annihilating sexual fetishism. Blake trapped in Shepperton did not eat at all, but he was aroused and performed sex with the entire suburban environment, including disabled youth, electronic machines, degenerate elderly, consumer products, council facilities, wasteland dirt, distant flyover, exotic vegetation and fish monsters. Family members merged together in primordial acts of cannibalism and devolutionary organ mergence, or androgenic sex multiplication. Reference by Fung Lee’s reading of the passages from Ballard’s book, the literary sub-urban crisis animates pansexual environmental promiscuity, which enthusiastically accelerates tropical overgrowth and cross-mutation with earlier forms of evolution.
After cycling into the river, Fung Lee announces: “I was born from the lowest creatures”. The statement references so-called Meckel-Serres Law, formulated over two centuries ago and stating that the development of the individual organism obeys the same laws as the development of the whole animal series; that is to say, the higher animal in its gradual development essentially passes through the permanent organic stages that lie below it.
This ‘devolutionary’ methodology applies the axiom ‘Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny’ into body performance art, as Fung Lee acts out gestures of “assembling the primitive flying creature whose ancient bones (they) had found on the beach. With its outstretched arms, its slender legs and delicate feet, bones jewelled by time, it more than ever resembled a small winged man – perhaps myself, who had lain these millions of years in the bone-bed of Thames, sleeping there until it was time to be freed by the falling” bicycle (p.119, JG Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company, Triad Panther, London).
As the falling bicycle drowns to become a fossil of extinction, Lee Fung performs devolution into flying fish. This biogenetic potency recalls Blake, described by Ballard as a minor pagan fertility demon, “odd mile in diameter” from the Thames riverside bicycle crash, driven by determination to mate with everyone and everything in Shepperton. Circling around, spilling bodily liquids all over the suburb, fish-bird wants to copulate with the town itself and transform it into the most exotic form of life. Spreading of its semen spawns an equatorial jungle.
Indulging in the Ballardian fantasy, residents of Shepperton desire to start a flying school as their bodies transform into bird creatures so they can finally fly away. Shepperton has become a life engine of the most excessive mutations, through the act of fish-bird transplantation of other people and creatures’ organs into its body, germinating within the waters of the Thames.
