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.

Virilio makes all the connections clear: between the way early 20th Century avant-gardes twisted and tortured the human form before making it vanish in abstraction and the blasting to bits of men who were no more than cannon fodder in the trenches of the Great War; between the German Expressionists' hate-filled portraits of the damned and the "medical" experiments of the Nazi eugenicists; between the mangled messages of sensationalist advertising and terrorism. A brutal logic rules this shattering of representation: our ways of seeing are now fatally shaped by unprecedented "scientific" modes of destruction.