Volume 6 – "High Rise" by J.G. Ballard

Set in an East London tower block, High Rise is a collective descent into barbarism. 2,000 well-to-do residents shed their civilised inhibitions as conventional social order breaks down and embrace their transformed world in a Freudian journey.

In Ballard's work, dystopia is a psychopathic rebellion against a sterile urban environment, in which technology is both liberator and oppressor. People are freed from the need to look after themselves and reduced into dependency. With no possibility of escape, residents are forced to come to terms with their transformed world or die.

Combining the recreational consumerism of Brave New World and the violent self-expression of A Clockwork Orange, High Rise is a modern fable: the private fantasies of the mind have been turned outwards into the physical landscape, while the landscape of social life has penetrated inwards into the human psyche, resulting in a descent into barbarism. This, however, is not a regression to a primitive state; it a new atavism – the atavism of an urban, technological, media-savvy society.

Volume 6 interprets the discomforting and extreme metaphors within High Rise to uncover a commentary on the aggression that hides behind polite social conventions.

The Series