Memories of the Space Age

I've just been sifting through my big pile of portfoliable work, and found this poster I designed last summer. Actually, it's not so much a design as a cinematic fantasy. It's an entry for Little White Lies' brief to create a poster for a future film – not necessarily a real future film, just one that’ you’d like to see made. I went for an adaptation of JG Ballard’s Memories of the Space Age after reading about it in Andrew Smith’s excellent Moondust.

“On the flight, I was lost in a brilliant collection of JG Ballard short stories called Memories of the Space Age. Most of them revolve around the Cape, and Cocoa Beach in particular, where NASA’s human cargo lived in the run-up to missions. Ballard’s jaundiced view of the Space Age is that it constituted a crime against evolution, a blind, hubristic leap into a realm where we do not belong, where all we can do is sow our disease and spread the human stain ever more thinly across the Universe. In his stories we find the Cape abandoned, laid waste by microbes from Mars as dead astronauts circle the earth in their capsule coffins, or serving as a beacon for falling space debris, roamed only by irradiated scavengers seeking icons in mangled bits of spaceship or spaceman bones.”

This seemed like a good opportunity to delve into NASA’s impressive archive of copyright-free images and find something suitably retro-futuristic-dystopian. I'm pretty happy with the results, although I have to keep reminding myself that this film doesn’t actually exist – although it really really should. Seriously, look at that amazing ensemble cast I’ve managed to assemble within my imagination.

Mr Anderson, are you reading this?