In 1958 J.G. Ballard created Project For A New Novel--an entire novel reduced to look like two-page magazine spreads, and planned to be posted on billboards. According to Ballard's friend and Ambit editor, Dr. Martin Bax, "It's eight frames photocopied with famous Ballard characters like Coma and Kline. Most of the text you can't read because when you see things on billboards you don't read the small print, so the text is deliberately blurred--you can only read the headlines and some remarks. I don't know why I never published it. I had it framed some years ago. It [hung] above my mantelpiece." In July 2008, at the "J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium" exhibition at 'Museum of Contemporary Culture, the exhibition organizers obtained the framed copy of Project For A New Novel from Bax, and this exhibit revealed there were not four, as originally thought, but five double-page layouts. The spread includes five sections: "Beach Fatigue" (previously unknown), "mr. f is mr. f," "Time Zone," "T-1," and "T-12." These collages incorporate themes and names that were later to resurface in the stories that formed The Atrocity Exhibition; they consist of fragments of technical and technological language framed by headings. These combinations of "magazine style" headings and text gleaned from Ballard's work on the magazine Chemistry & Industry generate significance in a new symbolic order structured by post-war science and technology. Ballard made these collages early in his career, a few years before the Kennedy assassination. In them he established his method for dealing with the explosion of mass communications in the 1960s, especially of images, of which the assassination was a significant aggregation for Ballard.
