SHOCK FACTORY: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music with Nicolas Ballet

SHOCK FACTORY: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music. An in conversation with Nicolas Ballet, hosted by Ian Trowell.

Industrial music appeared in the mid-1970s, and far from being a simple sound experimentation phenomenon, it quickly spawned a coherent visual culture operating at the intersection of a multitude of media (collage, mail art, installation, film, performance, sound, video) and initiated a close inspection of the legacy of modernity and the growing, pervasive influence of technology.

Originally British, the movement soon outgrew Europe, extending into the United States and Japan during the 1980s. The sound experiments conducted by industrial bands – designing synthesizers, manipulating and transforming recorded sounds from audio tapes, either recycled or laid down by the artists – were backed up by a rich array of radical visual productions, deriving their sources from the modernist utopias of the first part of the 20th century. Such saturated sounds were translated into abrasive images, manipulated through the détournement of reprographic techniques (Xerox art), that investigated polemical themes: mind control, criminality, occultism, pornography, psychiatry and totalitarianism, among others.

This book introduces the visual and aesthetic elements of 1970s and 1980s industrial culture to a general history of contemporary art by analysing the different approaches taken and topics addressed by the primary protagonists of the movement, who perceptively anticipated the current discourse concerning the media and their collective coercive power.

About the Author:

Nicolas Ballet is an art historian and attaché de conservation in the New Media Department of the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. He specializes in research into alternative visual cultures, experimental art, sound studies and the avant-garde. He received his Ph.D. from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he teaches contemporary art history. He has written essays exploring the visual and sonic contributions of countercultures and experimental artistic practices. He is the author of two books on Genesis P-Orridge and has published in Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, Octopus Notes, Marges, Optical Sound, Volume !, Revue & Corrigée, Klima, Cahiers du CAP, and Histo.art (Éditions de la Sorbonne) as well as in books devoted to the work of Nigel Ayers, John Balance, Zoe Dewitt and The Rita, and to the visual history of black metal (Analogue Black Terror, vol. I, 2019; vol. II, 2021 and Arma Christi: Black Metal Apparel from the 20th Century, 2024).

In 2023, he curated the exhibition “Who You Staring At?” Visual Culture of the No Wave Scene in the 1970s and 1980s at the Centre Pompidou. He also curated Persuasion: Industrial Music and Mind Control (1975–1995) (Geneva, HEAD, 2015) for the research project “MIND CONTROL, Radical Experiments in Art and Psychology 1950–1970,” AntipsychiARTrie: Art and Antipsychiatry from 1960 to the Present (INHA, 2019, with Aurore Buffetault, Hélene Gheysens and Sandrine Meats), “Where May we sit?” Activist Video from the 1970s in France (Centre Pompidou, 2022–23, with Julie Champion and Hélene Fleckinger) and Fred Forest and Information Technology: Archives of Video and Digital Projects (Centre Pompidou, 2024, with Philippe Bettinelli and Rossella Cillani).

Nicolas Ballet was also awarded the Olga Fradiss Prize 2024, from the Fondation Lucie et Olga Fradiss, hosted by the Fondation de France, for the French edition of his book Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music.

Photo of Nicolas Ballet: Veronique Ellena

About the Host:

Ian Trowell is an independent researcher who documents punk, post-punk and other popular cultures. He has written extensively on British fairgrounds and their relationship to pop music and subcultures, completing a PhD on this subject in 2017. His work has been published in numerous academic journals and magazines, with a particular emphasis on looking at the role of memory, archival evidence and how mythology becomes entrenched in many historical narratives.

Born in 1965, he grew up in Derby and moved to Sheffield in 1984 where he remained until 2017, enjoying the vibrant subcultures and music of the city and the stunning landscapes on the Peak District. He currently lives and works in Cambridge, but is hoping to get back up north at the first opportunity.

Ian is the author of An Endless Discontent, his first full-length book, exploring the troublesome and heavily mythologised trajectory of Throbbing Gristle.