One of JG Ballard’s greatest novels is Crash, a dark and magnificent tale of car crash fetishists. As a tribute to Ballard, a private pilot known as Crashman brought his fascination with airplane crashes online for the public to, er, enjoy. For years, Crashman has collected videos of plane crashes and edited them to music. In 2006, he uploaded the bulk of them to YouTube as an “experiment.” The Ballardian blog has an essay by Crashman where he explains his fascination that may be less unique than one might think. From Ballardian:
After I had made a few of the videos public, a collective audience began to slowly emerge. I began to receive feedback and criticism, sometimes constructive, often laudatory, and sometimes merely abusive. But these people were accustomed to horrible sights and events already, like a doctor or air crash investigator. How would a random, general audience feel and what would they say? I took the next step: in 2006 I uploaded most of the videos to YouTube.I expected to be excoriated by this wider, larger general public as a ghoul, an exploiter of the suffering of others, and as it happened the word ’sick’ was freely applied to the videos as well as to myself. I considered this a compliment, as it mirrored the initial publishers’ response to Crash (’This author is beyond psychiatric help: do not publish’). But, and I had expected this too, neo-Ballardians began to show themselves, finding subtle excitements and even strange beauty in the videos, that uneasy, disquieting splendour inherent in the slow-motion breakup of a speeding aircraft.
Link to Ballardian, Link to buy Crash (Thanks, Mark Dery!)