“As with the printing press, if it’s really a revolution, it doesn’t take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort of organizing political force to the Treaty of Westphalia, when we finally knew what the new unit was: the nation state.
“I’m not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this [but] 50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage… and institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed, and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be.”
“I came home one evening – I had just driven from Isleworth to Borehamwood, which is a long drive, and my mother said, ‘You’ve got to go back to the studio right away’.
“I was furious. I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘They’re testing operators for something – Technicolor or something – so you’ve got to go back to be tested and have an interview’. Those that had been in came out shaken because the questions were highly technical.
“When it came to my turn they started all this technical stuff and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m your man because I’m a dunce at a lot of these things’.
“So there was a shocked silence and they said, ‘How do you expect to get on?’ I said, ‘Well I’m very fond of painting, and I also watch the light’. I had formed a habit, oddly enough, of watching the light in a room.
“Anyway, they said, ‘Which side of the face does Rembrandt light?’ I said ‘This side,’ which was a guess, really. ‘And for etching, of course, it would be reversed’. That was another bluff. But the next day they told me I had been chosen.”
