Text page
Dan O'Hara on Ballard, Cyberpositive, and the skeuomorph - Imperica - arts, technology, and media magazine
A cyberpositive text that opposes positive escalation to the defensive logic of the Human Security System.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central move of theory-fiction is to treat style and concept as inseparable. Fiction is not illustrative garnish placed on top of theory; it is one of the ways theory begins to operate materially.
These texts work by montage, compression, fictional carriers, and unstable voices. They build scenes, entities, markets, or atmospheres that behave like conceptual machines rather than like examples waiting to be decoded.
That matters because a great deal of the archive's originality lies in form. The writing does not merely report on cyberculture and modernity; it engineers new ways of sensing and narrating them.
How to read this text
Read the title, opening burst, and recurring terms before trying to flatten the text into a normal argument. Orientation comes from motifs and relays, not from a single thesis statement.
Track where journalism, fiction, market language, and philosophy contaminate each other. That contamination is the method.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Dan O'Hara - photo courtesy Luke Robert Mason 15 years after the publication of Cyberpositive, we invited Dan to talk about the intervening period, as well as focus on a range of interests including skeuomorphism and the life and works of J.G. Ballard. Why now for a re-issue of Cyberpositive, do you think?
Definition · paragraph 11
If society is becoming more Ballardian, it's only because Ballard observed a metatendency of social engineering, architecture, technology, marketing and politics to merge in a schizophrenizing assault upon the human, and then extrapolated from this metatendency to its logical extremes in his fictions.
History · paragraph 1
Imperica - arts, technology, and media magazine Search... Go News In conversation Viewpoint Features Bricolage Connect Shop About Newsletter Ello Facebook Twitter Contact us In conversation Thursday, 15 November 2012 09:58 Dan O'Hara on Ballard, Cyberpositive, and the skeuomorph Dan O'Hara's interests are both varied and, certainly for us, profound.
History · paragraph 1
Part of the O(rphan)d(rift>) collective that released the seminal Cyberpositive in 1995 ("... probably the first Deleuzean technotheory novel"), O'Hara has gone on to extensively study and write about a number of key themes within socio-technological discourse. Dan O'Hara - photo courtesy Luke Robert Mason 15 years after the publication of Cyberpositive, we invited Dan to talk about the intervening period, as well as focus on a range of interests including skeuomorphism and the life and works of J.G. Ballard.
Afterlife · paragraph 10
Certainly he was a major influence upon Cyberpositive, but I'd describe that book as neither academic nor fictional but somatic. Ballard's influence there was visual as much as conceptual; it had to do with the visionary power of The Drowned World.
Appears in sections
Theory-Fiction and Cyberstyle Primary section
How theory-fiction, cyberpunk prose, and anti-academic style became part of the archive's method.