The film's ultimate aim is to address and dispel some of the public's fear of "bioterrorism", which has been greatly exaggerated since 9/11 (even though that attack had nothing to do with the use of biological agents). This exaggerated fear is based on incomplete awareness of the facts. Moreover, this type of fear has been exploited by governments over the past eight decades to initiate biological warfare programmes at enormous cost.
Marching Plague
Steve Kurtz presented Critical Art Ensemble's latest work on bioterrorism - Marching Plague. He initiated the talk by stating the difficulties for the group to perform wet due to the ongoing court case facing Kurtz after he was under investigation for bioterrorism. A grand jury wouldn’t indict him on that, but Kurtz is still facing mail- and wire-fraud charges; he could get up to twenty years
Marching Plague therefore had to take the format of a short film - but the commentary is related to the scrutiny Kurtz has been subjected to and deals specifically with what he called a paranoid culture and government overspending on bioterrorism protection. The work produced a critical comment on this issue. However its close alignment with journalism and news reportage type narration removes the work further away from more creative narrative and we are left without an artistic experience as a whole.