Slouching into Hollingsville for episode ten of the series are artist Laurie Lipton and Strange Attractor’s Mark Pilkington. Musical interludes come courtesy of the McCarricks with background moods by Graham Massey.

Monsters, no matter what their shape or size or attitude, serve as a warning and should be welcomed as such. Having no place either in nature or in polite society, they have little choice but to exist as reminders of the things we’d much rather forget. Godzilla, for example, has been good to us over the years, the way only a bad dream can be. The unforeseen by-product of atomic tests taking place in the Pacific Ocean over fifty years ago, the blinding intensity of Godzilla’s birth ensured that he cast more than one shadow over the intervening decades. But what about the monsters that lurk in our own homes – or the ones that occupy the vast deserts of modern myth?

After visiting Mars, where next? Welcome to Hollingsville: the new twelve-part series from writer Ken Hollings. A World’s Fair of the airwaves, the shows focuses each week on a different aspect of our historical relationship with technology. From machines to monsters, spaces to dreams, this Radio Expo offers an unscripted tour through the chosen theme, utilising voices and sounds from special guests and presented by Ken Hollings with his usual idiosyncratic flair.

Ken Hollings is the author of Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information go to http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk or http://www.kenhollings.blogspot.com

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Appearing on episode nine of ‘Hollingsville’ are cultural pathologist supreme Ross MacFarlane of the Wellcome Library and the celebrated crime novelist Cathi Unsworth. Join Ken Hollings and his guests for gimlet-eyed observations and flinty asides. Musical interludes come courtesy of the masterful UnicaZürn, with background moods by Graham Massey.

The wound represents an entry into the body which is made by something that can never be a part of that body. It will always be foreign to our flesh, and as such it constitutes a technological assault upon the body. Its effects are extraordinary: from the ecstasies of saints revealed as stigmata to the forensic scrutiny of modern crime scenes, the wound communicates more than just another opening of the human body.

After visiting Mars, where next? Welcome to Hollingsville: the new twelve-part series from writer Ken Hollings. A World’s Fair of the airwaves, the shows focuses each week on a different aspect of our historical relationship with technology. From machines to monsters, spaces to dreams, this Radio Expo offers an unscripted tour through the chosen theme, utilising voices and sounds from special guests and presented by Ken Hollings with his usual idiosyncratic flair.

Ken Hollings is the author of Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information go to http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk or http://www.kenhollings.blogspot.com

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Joining Ken Hollings for episode eight of ‘Hollingsville’ are Roger K Burton, of the Horse Hospital and the Contemporary Wardrobe Collection, and artist Edwin Pouncey, AKA Savage Pencil. Expect tough talk and grim idealism. Interludes for the show are taken from the Edwin Pouncey archives and include an extract from the recorded interview he conducted with the legendary Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth. Another radio first!

Trash has traditionally been seen as the unnecessary expression of popular mass consumption: the further we progress, the more trash we generate. Waste, squandering and surplus value are tied up with notions of identity and self-worth. The use of recycled materials has become an orthodox virtue – but what about the discarded trash of our culture? From classic ‘kustom kar’ pinstriping, and tattoo ‘flash art’, to musical exotica and Z-grade movies, an entire ‘trash aesthetic’ has come into being –- a refuge for sensibilities tired of the banalities on offer both from the mainstream and academic markets. Trash, in other words, is the outer expression of a culture opened up and left to bleed.

After visiting Mars, where next? Welcome to Hollingsville: the new twelve-part series from writer Ken Hollings. A World’s Fair of the airwaves, the shows focuses each week on a different aspect of our historical relationship with technology. From machines to monsters, spaces to dreams, this Radio Expo offers an unscripted tour through the chosen theme, utilising voices and sounds from special guests and presented by Ken Hollings with his usual idiosyncratic flair.

Ken Hollings is the author of Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information go to http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk or http://www.kenhollings.blogspot.com

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In the seventh episode of ‘Hollingsville’, studio guests are creator of glamours Tai Shani and cultural hustler supreme Richard Strange. Prepare to be blinded by silence. Specially commissioned musical interludes and moods are by ‘Hollingsville’ composer in residence, Graham Massey. Ins and outs, as always, are by Indigo Octagon.

After staging the first complete performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations, a work that requires over 18 hours in which to enfold, John Cage remarked that ‘the world looked new, absolutely new’. Ideas of simultaneity and the instantaneous, as developed in variety theatre, cabaret and modern dance, gave way to the notion of duration as the main organizing principle. Anything could now be part of a performance. What then has become of the stage itself? Is it just another non-place, or as the site for events that are as yet unknown? Can the world still be absolutely new? And who is now waiting in the wings to amaze us?

After visiting Mars, where next? Welcome to Hollingsville: the new twelve-part series from writer Ken Hollings. A World’s Fair of the airwaves, the shows focuses each week on a different aspect of our historical relationship with technology. From machines to monsters, spaces to dreams, this Radio Expo offers an unscripted tour through the chosen theme, utilising voices and sounds from special guests and presented by Ken Hollings with his usual idiosyncratic flair.

Ken Hollings is the author of Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information go to http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk or http://www.kenhollings.blogspot.com

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In the sixth episode of ‘Hollingsville’, studio guests will be Andy Sharp AKA English Heretic cartographer of intense psychic spaces and radical mediumistic ideologue Mark Fisher. Specially commissioned musical interludes will be by English Heretic with additional moods by ‘Hollingsville’ composer in residence, Graham Massey. Ins and outs are by Indigo Octagon.

‘The concept of “place”,’ the editors of Archigram asserted, ‘exists only in the mind.’ As the influence of the airport, the shopping mall, the international hotel and the modern office block impinges upon our consciousness, the concept of ‘place’ becomes increasingly unreal. Networked ‘interactive’ spaces now flicker and whisper around us, conjuring up dreams of data, ghosts of purpose and direction. Space has become haunted, and we have become the phantoms wafting like dreams through our own cities.

After visiting Mars, where next? Welcome to Hollingsville: the new twelve-part series from writer Ken Hollings. A World’s Fair of the airwaves, the shows focuses each week on a different aspect of our historical relationship with technology. From machines to monsters, spaces to dreams, this Radio Expo offers an unscripted tour through the chosen theme, utilising voices and sounds from special guests and presented by Ken Hollings with his usual idiosyncratic flair.

Ken Hollings is the author of Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information go to http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk or http://www.kenhollings.blogspot.com

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Episode 5: Dreams: While the City Sleeps

Welcome to the fifth episode of ‘Hollingville’. My studio guest is Julian House of Ghost Box. Be on the lookout for deep-water soundings, lurking sea monsters, phantom sonar activity, the ruins of Atlantis and spectral dream broadcasts from beyond. Specially commissioned musical interludes will be by David Knight with additional moods by Indigo Octagon and the ‘Hollingsville’ composer in residence, Graham Massey. Ins and outs, as usual, are by Indigo Octagon.

‘What precisely is a dream?’ asked William Burroughs. ‘It is a specific juxtaposition of word and image.’ This connection of word and image to create heightened states of perception which are neither precise nor specific in any way: technology can still offer only offer external proof of internal activities that evade rational understanding. We either find ourselves on dry land or all at sea. Starting with Salvador Dali’s ‘Dream of Venus’ pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, we will be journeying through a submerged paradise of glass, steel and Manhattan tap water on a voyage to the bottom of our minds.

After visiting Mars, where next? Welcome to Hollingsville: the new twelve-part series from writer Ken Hollings. A World’s Fair of the airwaves, the shows focuses each week on a different aspect of our historical relationship with technology. From machines to monsters, spaces to dreams, this Radio Expo offers an unscripted tour through the chosen theme, utilising voices and sounds from special guests and presented by Ken Hollings with his usual idiosyncratic flair.

Ken Hollings is the author of Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information go to http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk or http://www.kenhollings.blogspot.com

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Welcome to the fourth episode of ‘Hollingville’. My studio guest is music and technology writer Becky Hogge, former executive director of the Open Rights Group. Expect unscripted ruminations on social networking and online politics, high weirdness and paranoia, ARPANET and the Cold War, CNN and Desert Storm, DRM and balls of wool. Specially commissioned musical interludes are by Richard H Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire, with additional moods by the ‘Hollingsville’ composer in residence, Graham Massey, plus ins and outs by Indigo Octagon.

Networks have extended the range of our senses but also compromised them. As weapons systems, commercial enterprise, banking and home entertainment draw increasingly upon the same operating platforms, the neutrality of the network is open to question. Perhaps the most appropriate model for understanding the enduring nature of the network is the Labyrinth: a structure of mystifying complexity where technology, deception and violence all meet. Enter your password now.

After visiting Mars, where next? Welcome to Hollingsville: the new twelve-part series from writer Ken Hollings. A World’s Fair of the airwaves, the shows focuses each week on a different aspect of our historical relationship with technology. From machines to monsters, spaces to dreams, this Radio Expo offers an unscripted tour through the chosen theme, utilising voices and sounds from special guests and presented by Ken Hollings with his usual idiosyncratic flair.

Ken Hollings is the author of Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information go to http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk or http://www.kenhollings.blogspot.com

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Welcome to the third episode of ‘Hollingville’. My studio guests are composer and musician Bruce Woolley, friend to robots everywhere, and writer and editor James Bridle, who has built the universe’s largest computer out of matchboxes and beads. Expect live and unscripted ruminations on music-making machines: ‘the other kind of instruments’, typewriters, early movie cameras, factory assembly lines, opera houses and concert halls.

When Thomas Edison first screamed ‘Hullo!’ into the mute, expectant mouthpiece of his latest invention, the ‘phonograph’, in July 1877, a shift of seismic proportions took place.  Before even the faintest echo of a tune had registered upon a rotating cylinder, an entire culture lost its mind. As Nietzsche, using his brand new Malling Hansen Writing Ball, wrote in the late 1880s: ‘are these people or thinking, talking and writing machines?’ And have we mentioned music yet?  Specially commissioned musical interludes will be by Radiophonic, with additional moods by the ‘Hollingsville’ composer in residence, Graham Massey, plus ins and outs by Indigo Octagon. Now press play.

After visiting Mars, where next? Welcome to Hollingsville: the new twelve-part series from writer Ken Hollings. A World’s Fair of the airwaves, the shows focuses each week on a different aspect of our historical relationship with technology. From machines to monsters, spaces to dreams, this Radio Expo offers an unscripted tour through the chosen theme, utilising voices and sounds from special guests and presented by Ken Hollings with his usual idiosyncratic flair.

Ken Hollings is the author of Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information go to http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk or http://www.kenhollings.blogspot.com

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Welcome to the second episode of ‘Hollingville’. My studio guests are Russell Davies noted cultural commentator and and Resonance’s very own Richard Thomas, graciously filling in at the last minute for Gary Lachman, who is stuck in Florida, waiting for a flight back to London. Expect unscripted ruminations on the ecology of live and dead media, digital dematerialization, lo-tech art forms in a hi-tech world, on-air cricket commentary as an ambient radio event and the communications potential of village halls and four-minute podcasts.

McLuhan’s Understanding Media was subtitled ‘the Extensions of Man’; while Freud famously described man’s condition in the mechanical age as that of ‘a god with artificial limbs’. Does our newfound ubiquity in the digital regime come at a price – especially at a time when we can’t even get a plane off the ground? Specially commissioned commercial breaks are by the ‘Hollingsville’ composer in residence, Graham Massey, with ins, outs and moods by Indigo Octagon. Radio is a medium too, you know.

After visiting Mars, where next? Welcome to Hollingsville: the new twelve-part series from writer Ken Hollings. A World’s Fair of the airwaves, the shows focuses each week on a different aspect of our historical relationship with technology. From machines to monsters, spaces to dreams, this Radio Expo offers an unscripted tour through the chosen theme, utilising voices and sounds from special guests and presented by Ken Hollings with his usual idiosyncratic flair.

Ken Hollings is the author of Welcome To Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information go to http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk or http://www.kenhollings.blogspot.com