ABSTRACT
This chapter details an interview with Elaine Whittaker. In this interview, Elaine Whittaker explores the enormous power bioparanoia can have over us. The acceleration of global climate change is facilitating new outbreaks of these older menaces, but also giving rise to the germination of new infectious diseases. The possibility of contracting an infectious disease was palpable for everyone with the threat of SARS in 2003, Ebola in 2014 and 2015, and more recently with Zika and Lyme disease. The media, especially social media, highlighted certain aspects of these epidemics in a way that heightened peoples’ fear. The installation effectively transforms Hollywood ‘shock and disease’ movies into a radical aesthetic gesture of quite a different meaning. There is something very real in what Mike Davis referred to as an ‘ecology of fear’ that extends from policy and surveillance to the bio-panics created by public health warnings.
