The author JG Ballard reflects on invisible technologies and global networks in an annotation on Telstar in the guide for Whitechapel Gallery’s 1998 exhibition ‘Speed–Visions of an Accelerated Age’
“Invisible technologies rule our lives, transmitting their data-loads at the speed of an electron. Vast cash balances move around the world’s banking systems, bounced off satellites we never see, but whose electro-magnetic footprints bestride continents and form our real weather. In the near future aesthetic amd [sic.] cultural shifts in the planetary consciousness will move around the globe with the force and pace of tsunamis, replacing the slow, ancestral drift of politics and religion in the years before the information age.”
JG Ballard, 1998
Who shared this example?
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Niall Gallen
Dr Niall Gallen is an Early Career Researcher with an interest in responses to technology and its relationship to forms of social change across literature, visual art and within subcultures. His AHRC funded PhD investigated the cultural politics of forms of advocacy for accelerated change in the works of The Independent Group, Eduardo Paolozzi, J.G.…
