... In his series of ads, as with his typographic experiments in the late 1950s, Ballard moved far from the conventional domain of the fiction writer and became a visual artist and designer. Prescient in so many ways, he challenged the conceptual limitations of advertising, hijacked its techniques for his own ambivalent purposes, and anticipated the way that advertising space would become a pressure point and site of furious contestation. There is a direct line between the Ambit/New Worlds series and Barbara Kruger’s later art-world subversions of advertising formats, language and style. By the 1980s and 1990s, advertising was a regular target for culture jamming and billboard modification in the work of Adbusters and many others who questioned its dominance as public speech. Jeffery Plansker’s “subvertisements” (see examples spliced into this pop video) and Shawn Wolfe’s absurd advertising campaigns for the “Remover Installer” and other products that don’t exist are conceptual descendants of Ballard’s ads. 

Yet, when making these comparisons, Ballard’s concepts can still seem the most provocative, despite some minor defects of design, because they are less obvious in purpose than critiques based on parody that set out to attack advertising and he is a much better writer. His motivation wasn’t to criticize the medium, even though this is an implicit side effect, but to use it as a delivery system for disseminating personal, writerly intimations of unease about the violence of the time and its media representations. Just as his stories and novels were aligned with the speculative writing coming from the new wave of science fiction, so the “Advertiser’s Announcements” can now be seen as oblique early examples of a kind of work we have come to describe in the last few years as design fiction or speculative design.