Ken Hollings (blog at http://kenhollings.blogspot.com/)
'I'm always optimistic about the future, although I miss the confidence
and certainty with which it was once discussed in the Fifties. We
should all be vacationing on Mars by now!'
Ken Hollings - Ammo City interview, 2001
Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work draws freely upon
trash culture, weird science, political intrigue and strange connections
to reconfigure reality and demolish common assumptions. From digital
imagery to occult symbolism, from flying saucers to the theatre of
cruelty, his work embraces text, spoken word, music and multi-media
performances to create ideas and images for the 21st century.
 Ken's novel Destroy
All Monsters combines the fall-out from Operation
Desert Storm with Japanese monster movie iconography to reveal how
cybernetic culture is creating a new world order of apocalyptic, warring
communities.
 His writing has appeared in a wide range of
magazines and periodicals including The
Wire, Sight & Sound, Bizarre, Frieze, Gargoyle and CTHEORY as
well the anthologies Digital Delirium and The Last Sex from St Martin's
Press and Undercurrents from Continuum. He has presented
texts at the ICA in London, the Transmediale Festival in Berlin, The
CIM Festival in Holland, Sónar in Barcelona and the 2002 Sydney
Biennale. He has also edited books by John Cage, Jean Cocteau and Hubert
Selby, together with two volumes by Georges
Bataille for which he also
supplied introductory essays.
 Ken has collaborated with a number of musicians and performances on
live events, most notably Dutch composer Huib
Emmer on opera, live
multimedia performances and most recently the NPS national radio piece Welcome
to Distrubia, 'electro mavericks' (I-D magazine) Biting Tongues
on video and album releases and recent live performances, Mangina and
members of Berlin Techno crew Rechenzentrum. He has given lectures,
readings and performances in  clubs, cinemas and galleries and presented
work on radio and television, both participating in documentaries and
giving interviews. Most recently, he has been writing and recording
a profile of the original 1960s 'phone phreaks' for broadcast on BBC
Radio Three in March 2004.
Examples and reviews of his work
'It is Day 500 of Operation Desert Storm,
and everything is going according to plan.'
Destroy All Monsters (novel, Marion Boyars Publishers October 2001)
'A mighty slab of trippy, cult, out-there fiction… Mind-bending reading'
– The Scotsman
'Genuinely and spookily prescient' – Toby Litt
'A hallucinogenic spiral into future madness' – Lydia Lunch.
'It clearly wasn't the aeroplanes that
killed the beast, but it wasn't beauty either. It was the fall
from the top of the Empire State Building
that finally did for the mighty Kong. Landmarks can kill.'
Tokyo Must Be Destroyed (essay, 1995)
'One of the few examples of the theory of deconstruction brought lightly
in play in an elegant discursive manner' – Toronto Globe and Mail
'That Richard Nixon should have chosen
Fantasyland, Walt Disney World to announce that he was “not a crook”
says more about conspiracy politics
than anyone really needs, or wants, to know.'
But Then I'd Have To Kill You (Lux Cinema lecture series, London 2001)
'Those who do not learn from the fantasies
of the past are condemned to experience them again as the lurid
skin flicks of the future … let
the orgy begin.'
We Are All Depraved (live multimedia performance in collaboration with
electronics composer Huib Emmer, 1997)
'Zap culture for the initiated ... hilarious' - De Volkskrant |
