I was on the way to Cecily Brown’s exhibition at the Serpentine last week when I heard that Kensington Gardens had been locked down. Word was that terrorist drones armed with ‘radioactive material’ were on course to blitz the Israeli embassy, presumably taking out a large part of west London with it. Scary though this was, it was also –  as far as I’m aware – a wholesale fiction: an elaborate psy-op some would-be jihadist had staged to convince us that, yes, it could happen here. That it didn’t, and probably couldn’t, was irrelevant; what struck me was the fact that the security services didn’t consider it wholly improbable. The realisation felt unfamiliar and disturbing, a reminder that technological advance might pose a serious, sudden, existential threat of a kind unimaginable even a decade back.

Price’s film ‘Redistribution, 2026-2007’ is a bona-fide contemporary classic

Price’s film ‘Redistribution, 2026-2007’ is a bona-fide contemporary classic

This strain of future-shock, I suspect, is something that Seth Price clocked long before the rest of us. Born in 1973, Price is an artist, author, film-maker and all-purpose hipster overachiever who was carried to prominence by the post-internet art boom of the 2000s. He is interested in technology and the societal changes it is ushering in, the politics........

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