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Mark Dery
A Crash Course in Disaster Survival (A Critical Fiction About Paul Segers) I. Case Study For 13 days and nights, the patient, a 40-year-old white male (hereinafter, “P.”[1]), lived in a guerrilla campsite on the grounds of the Cacaofabriek arts center in Helmond, in a hovel he’d cobbled together from the remains of previous works: wooden beams, metal struts, plastic sheeting. He took up residence in his makeshift abode after the opening for a group exhibition, “Nonfiction” (2015), of which his encampment, “Mark the Points of No Return,” was a part, he said. In documentary photos, we see P., barefoot but still wearing the dark suit he wore to the opening, pottering about amid the bare necessities of civilization: canned food, a water cask, a campfire, a short-handled axe for splitting firewood, bottles of wine and wine glasses, a typewriter, toilet paper, a copy of Hardt and Negri’s critique of globalization, Empire. In a video, he bathes naked in a nearby canal, its black waters scummed by algal bloom. As the slate-gray sky grows light, he sits, stolidly watching cars whoosh past on the adjoining roadway, tires thrumming. P.’s imagination is steeped in science fiction. If he’s suffering from one of the personality disorders (PDs), he may have imagined he was Robert Maitland, the motorist marooned, by a blowout, on a triangle of overgrown wasteland in J.G. Ballard’s novel, Concrete Island. Hemmed in by hurtling traffic that never stops, Maitland shelters in his wrecked car and subsists on garbage, embarking on an existential voyage that’s equal parts survival and self-discovery. P. may see himself, and the steel-and-glass grayness around him, in a similar light. Does he believe, as Maitland does, that “these days one [needs] a full-scale emergency kit built into one’s brain, plus a crash course in disaster survival, real and imagined”?[1] In a written statement, P. informs that his “work” constitutes an attempt “to comprehend or react to some of the issues of the 21st century...a century characterized by acceleration, polarization, technological overload, and excess that seem to blur the line between reality and fiction more and more each day.”[2] In a diagnostic interview, he revealed that reading the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard “for the first time was exhilarating.”[3] Here, he thought, was “someone who could dissect contemporary society with a steady hand, pointing out all the strange deformations growing inside it. All the mixed thoughts, ordered and framed into something called the Hyperreal. Laying bare the structures that operate under the massive stream of images, ideas, and strategies.” He appears to read Baudrillard as a mythographer of the future present, and, paradoxically, science fiction novelists like Ballard and Philip K. Dick as philosophers—pathologists of the postmodern condition. “My favorite quote,” he says, “is Ballard’s ‘reality is a mass of competing fictions.’” At times, P. exhibits the “hyper-associative cognitive style”[4] associated with schizotypes: “I also started to notice connections between my sources, for example Chris Burden’s Trans-Fixed [a 1974 performance in which Burden was crucified on the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle] and the Ballard line, ‘In twentieth-century terms, the crucifixion, for example, would be re-enacted as a conceptual auto-disaster,” from The Atrocity Exhibition. You start to see along these lines of thought, it influences your perception. Truth or fact become secondary effects.” (Note: an examination using the Schizotypal Personality Scale is indicated.) He regards “the postmodern state” as “definitely pathological. It feels like we’re experiencing ‘signs of some kind of Darwinian adaptation,’ to quote Ballard again.” He feels that “people’s motives are becoming irrational,” but isn’t certain whether “these signs have just become more visible and mediated after the digital revolution.” 'It feels like being in between two states: I have a family (wife and daughter), I work as an artist, I teach, I’m working with people, so I’m firmly in society with one leg, and the other is somewhere in a wasteland of thoughts and images, trying to get a foot on the ground. It’s hard to explain, but on the other hand that’s exactly what alienation means.' (Screening for PDs, as a prerequisite to further assessment and determining optimal treatments, is advised. Possible screening measures might include the PD scales from the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems, the Iowa Personality Disorder Screen, and the self-directedness scale of the Temperament and Character Inventory.) In the documentary video of “Mark the Points of No Return,” P. glugs wine from the bottle, humming tunelessly as the multicolored plastic pennants tethered to his shanty lash and flap, whipped by the gusts of a coming storm. Titles appear onscreen, the diary entries of a postmodern Crusoe: “As we move towards a more psychotic landscape/ these traits are signs/ of a kind of Darwinian adaptation.[2] ... Slowly/ entering the desert/ of the mind.[3] ... Strange futures await./ The murder of the real.[4]/ Just submerge.” It’s dark now. In the sodium-vapor glow of the streetlights, P. shucks off his suit and ambles down the canal bank, a castaway on an island of grass returning to the overbuilt world that gave him up for lost. Or is he a Darwinian test pilot, pushing the envelope of a reverse evolution whose future lies in the primordial seas that bore us? Does he believe, as Dr. Bodkin does in Ballard’s ecopocalyptic novel, The Drowned World (1962), that “just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs”?[5] Or is he miming a psychotic strategy for escaping rising sea levels? Mentally, he may already inhabit an Amsterdam reborn as a new Atlantis, its tower blocks and office buildings patrolled by seals and sharks, Schiphol’s departure lounges teeming with herring. “Just submerge.” Is he acting out “an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation,” as Ballard would say—beckoning his countrymen toward a delusional evacuation route that will lead them out of a world on the brink of environmental disaster, into a virtual reality where we can experience our “own annihilation as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Benjamin)?[6] Out of the Desert of the Real and into the deserts of the mind? In the video, the scene fades to black, a darkness lit by the brightness of a splash as P. plunges into the inky waters. § II. A Private Cosmology Like the characters in Ballard’s fictions, P. is jury-rigging a private cosmology in much the same way that he fashioned his ad-hoc shelter, in “Mark the Points of No Return,” from discarded artworks. In that sense, he’s Claude Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur updated for the age of Twitter mobs, drone wars, and reality-TV politics, tinkering together a system of myths, symbols, and rituals from whatever’s at hand: The media landscape. The built environment. The flood tide of images inundating the mass unconscious. Technology, which increasingly remakes us in its own image and, more and more, has a mind of its own. Free-floating anxieties and conspiracy theories. The persuasion industries—P.R., marketing, branding, advertising. The psychopathology of everyday life in a world spun off its axis by info-vertigo. In works like Top Meeting (2012), P. seems to be piecing together the “terminal documents” of our times, to borrow Ballard’s phrase, in an attempt to unriddle the Enigma machine of geopolitical power, with its hidden agendas and covert operations. An installation at the Onomatopee art center in Eindhoven, Top Meeting consisted of a dilapidated shack littered with the remains of a top-secret strategy session: on a battered table, a clutter of beer bottles and cryptic, hastily scribbled notes; all around, papering the walls, are recovered memories of the Space Age—archival photos of astronauts and rocket launches—and, more ominously, maps, a rendering of a four-legged military robot, a photo of Gaddafi in military regalia. There are visual echoes, here, of the conceptual games played by the psychiatrist whose media-induced mental breakdown we witness, from the inside out, in Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition: Conceptual Games. Dr. Nathan pondered the list on his desk pad. (1) The catalogue of an exhibition of tropical diseases at the Wellcome Museum; (2) chemical and topographical analyses of a young woman’s excrement; (3) diagrams of female orifices: buccal, orbital, anal, urethral, some showing wound areas; (4) the results of a questionnaire in which a volunteer panel of parents were asked to devise ways of killing their own children; (5) an item entitled “self-disgust”—someone’s morbid and hate-filled list of himself and his faults. Dr. Nathan inhaled carefully on his gold-tipped cigarette. Were these items in some conceptual game?[7] “I’m looking for archetypal images within my own cosmology and language, though Joseph Campbell would probably see this as a mere update of existing archetypes,” says P. “Maybe an archetype can develop when the work is somehow able to lure the viewer into projecting his or her archetypal imagery into it.” He elaborates his hermetic language in works like Future Artifacts (2014), an installation at the art space DordtYart, in Dordrecht. Created in collaboration with his wife, the Norwegian artist Ajla Steinvåg, it was inspired by a plot thread in a Philip K. Dick novel, The Penultimate Truth (1964), “where an artist is asked to create artifacts that would suggest an alien species,” he says. “These artifacts were buried in a construction site (by people who’d traveled back in time) so that they’d be found by workers.” Wearing white coveralls reminiscent of “clean room” suits, the two artists built a ramshackle, curiously retro command center that calls to mind a disused Minuteman launch control room, or maybe a homeless person’s idea of a lunar module. Its plastic skin and aluminum-tube framework enclosed a bank of control panels studded with square, clunky buttons. On antiquated video displays, viewers watched footage of P. and Steinvåg in the woods, burying anachronistic relics in the hope that they’ll be discovered by archaeologists of the future. On closer inspection, these “future artifacts” look like Francis Bacon’s idea of steampunk: mutant devices, half-meat, half-metal, hideously deformed by tumorous growths. (In reality, sculpted epoxy, realistically modeled by Steinvåg, whose work has led her to study pathology, trauma simulation, and casualty make-up effects.) Here, a spidery tangle of tubes and wires is engulfed by a metallic malignancy, as if some cancer of the machine kingdom had metastasized throughout its spindly metal limbs. There, fleshy excrescences the color of raw meat cling to the joints of another gadget—premonitions of a world in which cybernetic organisms are susceptible to human diseases. Will the Louis Leakey of the 23rd century hail them as irrefutable evidence of an “alien species”--us, casualties on the Darwinian road to Homo cyborg, an evolutionary successor better adapted to a world where we’ve merged with our technological prostheses? § III. The Savage Mind P.’s approving remark that the performance artist and sculptor Paul McCarthy’s work “seems to be an attempt to brutally murder archetypes in a messy cathartic ritual of satirical self-destruction” is instructive. P.’s sculptures, installations, and performances may draw on Ballard’s bloodless dissections of the postmodern psyche and Baudrillard’s ironic celebration of its imploding ontology, but the texture of his aesthetic is messier and its surface temperature is hotter. Think: Mad Max meets Lévi-Strauss’s “savage mind.” In that regard, his work is closer to the dumpster-diving aesthetic of artists like McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Jon Kessler. It isn’t as gleefully anal-expulsive as McCarthy’s or as haunted by teen angst as Kelley’s, nor does it train its crosshairs on the psychic fallout of 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, as Kessler’s does. Even so, P.’s attraction to the derelict, the disheveled, and the recycled aligns him with all three, and the edgy, at times almost deranged humor of his art betrays at least a passing acquaintance with McCarthy’s comic-grotesque sensibility. (P. attributes his sense of humor to being born and bred in the southern Netherlands, where a “blunt, rough-edged, self-mocking” wit is part of the local flavor.) Works like Unlimited Dream Company—Linderveld Transformation Unit (2016) give off a wry whiff of social satire. Headquartered in a rough-and-ready plywood hut erected in farmlands near Deventer, in an area threatened by overdevelopment, P. spent three days in the “improvised office” of his imaginary firm, brainstorming tongue-in-cheek alternatives to corporate proposals for land use. Embracing a ludic urbanism worthy of New Babylon, the city of perpetual play and serendipitous drifting dreamed up by the Situationist architect Constant, P.’s “‘out-of-the-box’ concepts included the ‘Dubai of Overijssel,’ a Colonel Gaddafi-inspired combination of impressive architecture and amusement; ‘Interzone,’ a lawless free zone that could house illegal immigrants; and ‘Action Golf,’ a golf course that is simultaneously a military practice terrain.”[8] Another incarnation of the Dream Company, “Charrette Roulette” (2015), at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada, suggests a cross between The Bureau of Surrealist Research, opened in 1924 to record and preserve the public’s dreams, and a cabal of insurgent designers bent on critiquing conventional “design thinking and problem-solving.”[9] Working with local designers, P. interviewed walk-in customers about their dreams, anxieties, and frustrations, then devised “custom design solutions for unresolvable problems,” as the company’s tagline puts it. “The products are catalysts,” says P. “Their use is symbolic and possibly ritual in essence, allowing the users to confront their wishes and fears from a different angle.”[10] Among the psychotherapeutic objects the Dream Company turned out during its two-week residency was a heavy, lumpy block of molded rubber designed to be worn, backpack-style, by Edna, a tax accountant who dreamed of a more creative, intellectually fulfilling existence. A Surrealist object of sorts, it gave shape to the Sisyphean stone she felt she was pushing uphill: her much-neglected inner self, poles apart from the Kafkaesque identity she inhabited from nine to five. “The object serves as an externalization of the Self,” P. wrote, in a “user’s manual” banged out on an antique Smith-Corona. “It is an object to be discovered, and a physical representation of the unpresentable self. Wearing the object is a way of becoming aware of this presence. The object is a weight to carry.”[11] The Dream Company’s prescription for Edna involved ceremonially donning the object in a public space, then making an enormous drawing, in the kiddie medium of crayon, on the cement—a Freudian exorcism, of sorts. Making “a very large, public drawing” rekindled “the creative impulse,” P. hopes, while enacting the dream of reclaiming social space for her true self. “For someone working at the tax office, it must have been quite a different kind of day. She was ecstatic.” Another customer despaired of a humdrum existence so drearily unvarying “she had a very strong recurring feeling of déjà vu every single day in conversations she had, streets she walked, things she saw.” The Dream Company’s solution was a grab bag of “questions, suggestions, instructions, and observations on small strips of paper,” a low-tech strategy for derailing a life that ran on the rails of soul-crushing routines. “She would have to take out one strip every day and apply it. Instructions would be things like: ‘One illogical action, every day’ or ‘Change the course of someone else’s day with one sentence.’” The 1979 Ballard novel from which P.’s Unlimited Dream Company takes its name is a magical-realist delirium in which the London suburb of Shepperton is transformed into a luminous, bejeweled otherworld—mysticism by Blake, eroticism by Delvaux—when a failed medical student steps through the doors of perception. Perversely, P. spliced Ballard’s hallucinatory Freudianism to Dutch pragmatism, and—even more improbably—performed a public service in the process. “On the design side, I questioned the ‘functionality’ of design and the possibility to artificially ‘load’ objects with meaning and purpose, and on the psychotherapy side, I tried to get customers to confront personal barriers with the aid of these objects,” he says. “The weird thing was that a lot of people, although vaguely aware of the fact that this was taking place under somewhat strange circumstances, were eager to share very personal details with me about their lives and troubles. I think some of them expected some kind of solution from me, and I tried my best to serve them well.” § IV. The Return of the Repressed P. seems to be mounting a one-man insurgency against the pragmatism, bourgeois propriety, and Calvinist rectitude of Dutch society, not to mention the functionalist gospel of its design culture. He quotes the Dutch proverb, “Just act normal, then you’re already acting crazy enough”—an admonition, as he sees it, to “follow the herd and not get any weird ideas about anything.” Channeling the Freud of Civilization and its Discontents, he says, “To me, it says something about the surface and the underbelly. As in all societies, the ones who shout the loudest are the worst animals when it gets dark.” Clearly, his sympathies lie with the underbelly. In a country whose urban landscapes are “very stylized,” every square inch designed to a fare-thee-well, he’s drawn to abject spaces, liminal zones, illegal squats: his crude encampment at De Cacaofabriek, a messy irruption of the id that nettled the Dutch superego (“People came by to tell me I’d better get lost with all my trash as soon as possible; they warned me they could have it all on the garbage belt before the day was over”); the crate-sized house he nailed together from scrap during his stay in a Roma shantytown on the outskirts of Belgrade (Another Time, Another Place, 2014). A touchdown on a planet of slums, Another Time brought P. face to face with a landscape so alien it beggared description in anything but science-fictional terms. “It was beyond Mad Max. A landscape made of trash, like something past the end of everything. The remnants of a consumer society after the markets went down and the factories closed. … Walking around, between these bizarre sculptural shacks with ample light powered by stolen electricity and the smell of burning rubber from their stoves producing black smoke from the chimneys, transported me straight [to] another planet.”[12] Fallout shelters for an apocalypse—social, geopolitical, environmental—that’s already in progress, P.’s slapdash sanctuaries are an insult, as well, to the sleek high modernism of Dutch design. So, too, are works like Vingt Mille Lieues sous la Seine (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seine, 2015), a rattletrap submarine “patched together from aluminum plating” whose welds are as ragged as Frankenstein’s sutures, and Towards a New Functionality (2014), a spiky scrapheap of planks and panels suspended from a gallery ceiling.[13] Fabricated by a carpenter in Guangzhou, China with only P.’s abstract sketches for guidance, Towards a New Functionality looks like—like what, exactly? A mid-air collision between Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau and one of Lebbeus Woods’s “shard houses”? An explosion in a shingle factory (to coin a phrase)? One thing it’s not is functional. P.’s sculpture serves no purpose, beyond teasing the eye and taunting the mind. Lapping at the edge of Dutch consciousness is an awareness of our reliance on technology. Growing up in a place where 60% of the population lives below sea level and only an engineering project of pharaonic proportions— a byzantine network of barriers, sluices, and dams—keeps the North Sea at bay tends to sharpen that point. Likewise, huddling in a country the size of a lifeboat with 16 million of your countrymen encourages an emotional reserve, and a scrupulous attention to “rules and regulations,” says P. In his work, P. reimagines Freud’s Return of the Repressed for an age of intelligent machines, proliferating simulations, and the madness of crowds, online and off. Take his performance, A Lot of Brutes Have Been Clipped Here...[5] (2011), in which a pair of cranes mauled some junked cars, tearing into them and tossing them around an overlit parking lot like the Tyrant Lizards of a scrapyard Jurassic. The piece was inspired by Crash (1973), a Ballard novel in which an underground circle of auto eroticists explores the fetishistic potential of the car crash—“a new sexuality born from a perverse technology.”[14] P. took his cues, as well, from Ballard’s infamous exhibition of wrecks at a London gallery in 1970, a head-on collision between eros and thanatos that degenerated into drunken vandalism and the near-rape of a topless model in the back seat of a Pontiac. Brutes is “about power/force, and the animalistic behavior it evokes,” he notes. Appropriately, there was a carnivalesque mood of flush-faced sociopathy in the air that night. “In the beginning,” he recalls, “the drivers, whom I instructed through walkie-talkies, were very skeptical about the whole undertaking. But after a while...they started assuming their roles, and things started happening. There is a scene where the two machines seem to threaten each other, like animals ripping apart prey. That’s when the performance started running itself. Afterwards, the drivers were trying hard to conceal their childlike joy at this useless destruction.” In Walking the Dog (2016), an installation at the “Hacking Habitat—Art Of Control” exhibition in Utrecht, a rickety knockoff of Big Dog prances spastically to a slurry recording of Rufus Thomas singing “Walking the Dog.” (Big Dog is the uncannily lifelike quadruped robot brought to you by Boston Dynamics, the U.S. military contractor.) Like Jean Tinguely’s “useless machines” and Survival Research Laboratories’ techno-punk parodies of autonomous weaponry, P.’s tic-ridden robot lampoons our fundamentalist faith in technology, not to mention our blithe acceptance of the “collateral damage” inflicted by cubicle warriors—drone pilots whose experience of push-button obliteration is virtually indistinguishable from the video games they were raised on. “The work is an antidote,” P. says, “to the militarized technological ‘army of geeks’ (as the former director of DARPA, Dr. Regina E. Dugan, likes to call them), conjuring up war machinery straight out of the Terminator, which was supposed to be a science fiction story. My robot is an anti-hero...a clumsy entertainment machine that puts all its effort into a sleazy dance.” In like fashion, Stealth Pavilion (2013) repurposes death technology to subversive, satirical ends. It’s a portable conversation pit, tricked out with an armored canopy and steel plates, canted at crazy angles and painted matte black, to shield it from the eyes of the surveillance state. Here, P. turns the Stealth bomber’s black magic against the panopticon. The sculpture was inspired, on one hand, by the Foucauldian notion of the “heterotopia”—nomadic pockets of resistance and revolutionary desire that defy repressive regimes—and on the other by a secret hideaway P. and his friends used to sneak off to, as teens—an abandoned, tumbledown barn. Growing up in Eindhoven, a small town dominated, in those days, by the Philips Lighting company (and these days by the Philips High Tech Campus, “the smartest km² in The Netherlands”), P. equated the obsessive overdesigning of public space as the “sign of a very efficient and ordered mentality.”[15] He recalls, “It started to dawn on me that the Netherlands is a strict place in many ways, even though from the outside, it seems to be a very ‘free’ country.” Heterotopia beckoned. “My friends and I started roaming the streets, fields, and ‘forests’ at night, because the landscape seemed to turn into a surreal place, so totally artificial it looked like a fake world. We would hang around desolate places, viaducts, parking lots, buildings we could climb—society’s blind spots, where we could hide from the rules and regulations.” Abject spaces, liminal zones. Later, he worked as a garbage man, driving a truck with a robotic arm that lifted and emptied dumpsters. One of his co-workers, a former drug addict, “saw Jesus sitting in a trash container while he was emptying it.” Another, “a stoned psychopath who’d just gotten out of jail for stabbing his father to death with a screwdriver, picked a vicious fight with the driver” while P. sat, sandwiched between the two men. Transferred to the recycling department, P. salvaged tools and scrap he thought might prove useful in his work. His time as a garbage collector, operating heavy machinery and sorting refuse, together with his stint on the janitorial staff at the High Tech Campus, “where scientists wandered around the labs in white suits, fumbling with strange, high-tech installations,” stocked his unconscious with the signs and symbols of an ad-hoc mythology—the folklore of post-industrial man, bolted together from the ideologies and imagery of late-capitalist technoculture. “Years later,” he says, “this quote from Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man captured my imagination: ‘The brute fact that the machine’s physical power (only physical?) surpasses that of the individual, and of any particular group of individuals, makes the machine the most effective political instrument in any society whose basic organization is that of the machine process.’” § V. Course of Treatment The patient was given a battery of psychometric tests, most notably the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory). As of this writing, the results are still being collated, but a preliminary review of some of P.’s answers is instructive. Among the questions to which he answered “yes” are: I like to read newspaper articles on crime. Once in a while I think of things too bad to talk about. I have had very peculiar and strange experiences. At times, I have a strong urge to do something harmful or shocking. I have met problems so full of possibilities that I have been unable to make up my mind about them. I do not have a great fear of snakes. I am worried about sex. At times I have been so entertained by the cleverness of some criminals that I have hoped they would get away with it. I enjoy children. I am fascinated by fire. I often feel as if things are not real. — Mark Dery Endnotes. [1] Paul Segers, a Dutch artist born in Eindhoven, in 1976, and based there. Ranging over (and sometimes conflating) public installation, performance, and mixed-media sculpture, Segers’s work is informed by science fiction, postmodernism, technoculture, and urban design. [2] The line is a quote from an interview J.G. Ballard did with BCC Radio 3, on October 11, 1998. See “Grave New World: David Gale talks to leading thinkers about their radical vision of the future,” J.G. Ballard website, http://www.jgballard.ca/media/1998_nov11_BBC3_radio.html. [3] According to Segers, the phrase “Slowly/ entering the desert/ of the mind” was inspired by Albert Camus. “In The Myth of Sisyphus, he writes about the metaphor of going into the desert of the mind to find out what we are doing here: ‘those waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines.’ Mark the Points of No Return was some sort of simulation of this desert.” [4] The phrase is Jean Baudrillard’s; he uses it throughout his book, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). [5] Brutes was part of the exhibition Berichten van het Front at the Stedelijk Museum in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. [1] J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island (New York: Picador, 1973), 37. [2] Paul Segers, “Statement,” 2016, http://www.paulsegers.com/statement.html. [3] Paul Segers, e-mail interview with the author. All unattributed quotes are taken from this interview, conducted over the course of three weeks in September, 2016. [4] Fyfe S1, Williams C, Mason OJ, Pickup GJ, “Apophenia, Theory of Mind and Schizotypy: Perceiving Meaning and Intentionality in Randomness,” Cortex, Volume 44, Issue 10, November–December 2008, 1316–1325. [5] J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 43. [6] “An extreme metaphor”: J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Crash (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 6. “Own annihilation”: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 242. [7] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1990), 75. [8] Paul Segers, description of “Unlimited Dream Company—Linderveld Transformation Unit,” PaulSegers.com, http://www.paulsegers.com/udc-linderveld-transformation-unit.html. [9] Paul Segers, description of “The Unlimited Dream Company—Charrette Roulette,” PaulSegers.com, http://www.paulsegers.com/the-unlimited-dream-company.html. [10] Paul Segers, description of “The Unlimited Dream Company—Charrette Roulette,” PaulSegers.com, http://www.paulsegers.com/the-unlimited-dream-company.html. [11] Paul Segers, description of “The Unlimited Dream Company—Charrette Roulette,” PaulSegers.com, http://www.paulsegers.com/the-unlimited-dream-company.html. [12] Paul Segers, description of “Another Time, Another Place,” PaulSegers.com, http://www.paulsegers.com/another-time-another-place.html. [13] Paul Segers, description of Vingt Mille Lieues sous la Seine, PaulSegers.com, http://www.paulsegers.com/vingt-mille-lieues-sous-la-seine.html. [14] J.G. Ballard, Crash (New York: Picador, 1973), 13. [15] “Turning Technology into Business,” n.b., High Tech Campus Eindhoven website, https://www.hightechcampus.com/who-we-are. |
About Mark Dery:
Mark Dery is a cultural critic, essayist, and the author of four books: Escape Velocity, a critique of the libertarian-bro ideology that dominated the Digital Revolution of the ‘90s; two studies of American mythologies (and pathologies) The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, and, most recently, the biography Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. He has taught journalism at NYU and “dark aesthetics” at the Yale School of Art; been a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, and a Poynter Journalism Fellow at Yale. His byline has appeared in a broad range of publications, including New York, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Elle, Bookforum, Boing Boing, Cabinet, The Daily Beast, Hyperallergic, Salon, Wired, The Washington Post, and The LA Review of Books. |