was what my father did and that was what my father's father did." I think we're in the same position, but we are running on the myth of progress. My work is there to ask pretty serious questions about how we can shift our perception of what constitutes viable human actions or viable human behaviour. How can your work do that? The distinction between knowledge and understanding is an important one. I think understanding comes from being and doing, rather than being given data. In that respect, I apply scientific empiricism to its exact opposite. I'm interested in material truth, but I want to use it as a threshold for confronting people with what they can't control, can't order and, from the base of the known, to let them look at the unknown. Do you think that art provides more open ways of looking at human experience than science? It's a really interesting question - the determinism of scientific progress. I like to read about the continued analysis that's coming out of the Large Hadron Collider. I'm very interested in the completion of the genome project, and I'm fascinated by all of the extraordinary results that are coming out of neuroscience and the ability to map the synaptic activity of the brain. But I think it is disturbing that the endgame for science is that we will have analysed and understood things down to a degree of detail that probably no single person will ever be able to understand. I