THE MOST DANGEROUS ORGANISM OF THE NEW-RELIGION

-BRUTAL CITY-

Book: ‘Crash’ written by James Ballard 

Film: ‘Crash’  by my all time favorite director David Cronenberg.

In the post-technology age, the understanding has changed, such as a street man cannot comprehend anything that does not have a mediatic twin.

In my view, simulation represents its originality, which stands in the background, with just an accent on the irregular dimension; like the car collisions in the CRASH movie. The new subculture formed by mental and physical pleasures of the movie’s characters during the experiment of new sexuality, death, and danger’s dimension starts to shape a new way of life in which basic emotions and basic imagination become dominant. And this new life is tried to teach and insist on the others by a lonely and separate missionary, Vaughan.

I think the reason for the strange relation between the human body and metal and the reason for the characters acquiring this new relation is because of the one-moment meaningfulness – like finding new meanings of car crashes and sex in the characters’ lives – having an important value for the modern society even day after day; the losing of meaning for everything becomes rapid.

We can explain the new-religion concept at that point with a narrow definition. But, it is not that easy to tell…

If J. G BALLARD can produce metallic-reality simulations by his own imagination’s twins, of course with the help of CRONENBERG; book and movie, then, this means I can create a BRUTAL CITY that cannot be built but lives with simulation age’s architecture and medias, for his exploration of a brutal new life. And like CRONENBERG, I can produce the “architectural” reality simulations.

But how?

If the new-religion in the movie (and of course in the book) threatens the existing values and is shaped by a new form mixed with scare, then architecture can also create a human-machine city that stands outside the play by treating the existing values. Such a city that has its own play, tools, and aims; like living the endless changes and maybe a city that can provide continuous pleasure with its movements, as the characters felt during the car collisions’ few minutes crash and break-ups: that has no before and after!

The Brutal city should be the place of vagueness. That is to say, like making machines used in the movie (cars) on a much larger scale, moving faster, integrated with the human organism, and also such living-machines whose perspiration is in the color of blood, making the whole organism the place itself. And giving the prophet mission to the one who discovered this new situation –as Vaughan did in the movie- to the architect.

These new places must be the living-machines which are accepted as vagueness’ and fear’s boundary lines, top points of the crises. When these areas are accepted by an architect as vital new zones, brutal city, that likes Vaughan’s himself, coherent but unknown silhouette, both abstract and has identity, will come to the stage with its vision. And like Vaughan’s knowledge about the secrets of man and machine’s interactions, the architect will know all the secrets of the new life taking place in these new spaces and the pleasures of brutal city that s/he created.

As happening in the Crash; this new world –and of course this alternative culture for the post-technology age- will be depicting, in terms of paradoxical dimensions of “myself” that can see the lost time and place, of lonely and abandoned people – those cannot let free by the changing situations.