Zoo city, 2023. Ink on Hewlett Packard Gloss 235gsm, 840x1190mm. R18000

In Zoo city the ideas of British author JG Ballard (1930-2009) on the character of the contemporary city and its inhabitants are transmuted. Ballard creates fiction with the themes of chaos, violence, transience and abandonment.[1] In novels like High-rise (1975) he depicts dystopia in scenes of a luxury apartment building’s collapse into a jungle of chaos. In other works such as Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974) the narratives are engaged with how modern sociological and technological conditions have changed the human psyche. Ballard suggests that intense technological conditions deprive humanity of its humanness and render them more animal-like, self-centered and violent. Critics and commentators have often described Ballard’s dystopian visions as prophetic. In South African Lauren Beukes’ novel Zoo city (of 2010, with the same title as my digital production, Zoo city, of 2007), the words ‘being animalled’ are used.
 
.....[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/147456/jg-ballards-eerily-accurate-dystopias