Art and fear

Art and Fear is compulsory reading for anyone still wondering where art has gone and where science is taking us.

Paul Virilio traces the twin development of art and science over the 20th Century, a development that emerges as a nightmare dance of death.

In Virilio's scorching vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form as we know it.

At the start of the 21st Century science has finally left art behind as genetic engineers prepare to turn themselves into the worst of expressionists, the Human Genome Project their godless manifesto, the human being, the raw material for new and monstrous forms of life.

A brutal logic rules this shattering of representation: our ways of seeing are now fatally shaped by unprecedented 'scientific' modes of destruction.