The Atrocity Exhibition with annotations by JG Ballard ...

... and cross-references by Mike Bonsall

"... the reader has to move at quite a different speed through these stories ... he may want to shift about ... he also, almost certainly I think, has to work with a number of reference books ..."
George MacBeth interviewing Ballard in March 1967

The Atrocity Exhibition is considered one of Ballard's most difficult texts and I wanted to make a different way of navigating its complexity. Three reasons for my approach to hyperlinking the text:

• Simply to point to definitions of technical words as suggested by MacBeth
• To create an intertextual clash with the normative Wikipedia model
• To emphasise the poetic repetition of the text. The way HTML changes the font color of visited links creates a record of repetitions

The text is split into three columns:

• the left column contains individual paragraphs from the original text of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970); green links to JGB's notes in middle column, blue links to Wiki articles, red links to next mention of that character, ˅ links to next para
• the middle column has Ballard's annotations made for the RE-Search edition of the Atrocity Exhibition (1990); red links back to original texts in left column, blue links to Wiki articles, ˅ links to next para
• the right column has linked text mostly from Wikipedia

The site works best in landscape view or on a large screen

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This version by Mike Bonsall (2022) Image Salvador Dali