Search Results for: J.G. Ballard

The most interesting comic-book of this
years SPX was easily Yuichi
Yokoyama’s New Engineering. I’ve been obsessing
about Yokoyama’s work since I first saw random pages from his books
posted online. Now that I actually got my hands New Engineering I’ve
been concocting all kinds of strategies for reading and understanding
this work. I decided to string together a bunch of notes, observations
and theories I’ve accumulated over the last few of weeks into this
loose essay. Hopefully this will make some sense to someone out there
and they will find it useful in looking at Yuichi Yokoyama’s work.
By no means do I think any of this is the definitive way of looking at
this work. Picturebox plans
on publishing further volumes in the near future, and that work may contradict
some of things I say here.

I see the stories in New Engineering fall into two distinct,
though interconnected, categories. First, there are the ‘engineering’ stories,
where massive architectural projects are realized by gigantic machinery
with
some aid from the humans
(are they human?). The second category contains everything else. These
are stories of combat, athletics, warfare, fashion, etc. I’ll first
talk about the separate categories. Later I’ll attempt to make
some sort of unified statement on their relationship. First up is engineering.