What does the end of the world look like? Today, most of the answers to
that question come from cinema but there is a much longer tradition of
visualising the final catastroph, from Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic
woodcuts to John Martin’s blockbuster canvases. The public’s appetite for
scenes of destruction has always been immense.
In the basement of a chateau in Angers, France, there hangs the
Apocalypse Tapestry, 100 metres long and 4.5 metres high, which depicts
84 scenes from the Book of Revelation. Commissioned in 1373 by Louis I,
the Duke of Anjou, and designed by the Flemish painter Hennequin de
Bruges, it illustrates the progress of the apocalypse in threads of red, blue
and gold. Inevitably, the retelling bore the real-life scars of the Hundred
Years War and the Black Death. And history was not done with it. During
the French revolution, which felt to many people like an apocalyptic event
that turned the world upside down, the tapestry was looted and cut into
pieces that could be used as floor mats or horse blankets. Thus the work
experienced its own process of destruction and regeneration.
Until the nineteenth century, representations of the end followed the
script laid down by John of Patmos. In Revelation (the English translation
of apocalypse), this lurid visionary established the characters, themes and
chain of events with which artists could play: the four horsemen, the
armoured angels, the lake of fire. And the book promised the righteous,
after all the pain and bloodshed, a release from human suffering. The
Angers tapestry concludes with John ascending to the New Jerusalem.
Science and secularism have since introduced or expanded other
possibilities, including machines, bombs, pandemics, natural catastrophes
and lethal visitations from the solar system, minus Revelation’s glorious
salvational finale. In these scenarios, the end really does mean the end.
As far back as 1893, the French astronomer and author Camille
Flammarion remarked that “our planet will be at a loss to choose among
so many modes of death.” Often, that choice is not even made because
dread of the end of the world does not have to cohere around a single
cause. The sociologist Richard G. Mitchell Jr spent two decades asking
Americans survivalists what exactly they thought they would be surviving
and found no consensus. The driver of survivalism is gut fear in search of
an objective justification.
That fear is not confined to off-the-grid eccentrics with bunkers full of
guns and tinned food. It can be felt throughout our culture, whether as an
obsession, an assumption, an urgent warning or a grim punchline. Like
millenarian Christians, many people feel on some level that this world is
so troubled and corrupted that it is beyond saving. It sometimes seems
impossible to imagine a future that is not worse than the present. Lines
from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (“Things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold”) have been quoted so often that they have become a truism.

And yet things have not fallen apart. The centre has held. The world
stubbornly refuses to end. Of course, the past is a limited guide to the
future but it does tell us that we are not a uniquely anxious or imperilled
generation.
In the summer of 2023, Koen Taselaar was invited to see the Angers
tapestry and consider creating a 21 st century response. “Everything
clicked for me,” he says. “Every generation seems to have their own
apocalyptic narrative.” The project would enable him to explore these
dreadful sentiments throughout history and use them to contextualise our
own concerns. Unlike a movie or a novel, bound by a single narrative, a
tapestry is the ideal format in which to represent the multiplicity of
possible world-ending events and our emotional responses to them.
Taselaar calls End And an “apocalyptic parade”. It is 19 metres long and
3.5 metres high, woven on a Jacquard machine so that it can be viewed
from both sides. The machine tells its own story. Patented by Joseph
Marie Jacquard in 1804, the process uses a chain of punched cards to
produce the design. Jacquard’s use of cards attracted the attention of the
British inventor Charles Babbage, whose work with Ada Lovelace laid the
foundation for computers, a technology that has inspired numerous
fictions about killer machines. When you’re dealing with a subject this
large, you find such interconnections everywhere. History itself comes to
seem like a vast tapestry of threads.
Following the arc of Revelation, the Angers tapestry employs John of
Patmos as its narrator. End And playfully assigns that role to a series of
creatures that have been resident on Earth long enough to serve as
eyewitnesses, even when they don’t have eyes, each one framing a
cataclysmic event inside a speech bubble. The story begins with the
ocean-dwelling glass sponge, believed to be the planet’s oldest extant
animal, while an Ammonoidea narrates the elimination of non-avian
dinosaurs 66 million years ago — a genuine extinction-level event.
While it is true to say that the whole world hasn’t ended yet, it has
effectively concluded for those at the epicentre of great disasters like the
eruptions of Vesuvius in 79 AD and Krakatoa in 1883. “Was this not for
them the end of the world?” Flammarion asked. In End And, we see the
invasion of the Americas, which led to the death of around 90% of the
population through war and disease, and the Lisbon earthquake, which
destroyed 85% of the city in 1755. The victims of the atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki also had good reason to perceive the
apocalypse. “I thought this was the end of Hiroshima — of Japan — of
humankind,” recalled one survivor.
Another strand of the tapestry is religious eschatology, which is not
confined to the Bible. It was the prophet Zoroaster who first reimagined

history as a linear experience, with a beginning, a middle and an end,
rather than an eternal cycle. The Norse had Ragnarök, the doom of the
gods. In the medieval section of the tapestry, we meet Joachim of Fiore,
the Italian monk who repopularised the imminence of the Christian
apocalypse in the late 12 th century. But prophecy is a tricky business. The
followers of the American preacher William Miller expected the Second
Coming of Christ in 1844 and called his non-appearance ‘The Great
Disappointment’. Their successors tend to steer clear of precise deadlines,
though they are no less convinced that Armageddon is right around the
corner.
The end of the world without God was made possible by Enlightenment
science and introduced to fiction by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley. In End
And, the writers are pelted by the endless rain of 1816’s “Year Without a
Summer”, a period of temporary climate change brought about by the
eruption of the volcano Tambora. Sheltering from the deluge in a rented
house on the shores of Lake Geneva, Byron wrote the unflinchingly bleak
poem ‘Darkness’ and Shelley conceived Frankenstein’s creature, which
proceeded to stomp through the imaginations of anyone concerned about
the anti-human menace of industry and artificial life. Taselaar presents
spiritual descendants like James Cameron’s Terminator and the
Maschinenmensch from 1927’s Metropolis in the style of a Bauhaus ballet,
Triadisches Ballett, which coincided with the birth of the robot in Karel
Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.
The great rupture in the history of the apocalyptic imagination was the
fiery genesis of the atomic bomb on 16 July 1945. Until that moment, the
general understanding was that the asteroid, the plague or the new ice
age would not be our fault but now, at last, humanity had discovered the
means to destroy itself in a matter of days. A new crime was made
possible: omnicide. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project
Colleagues perceived their invention’s world-ending potential during the
Trinity test (one called it “the nearest thing to doomsday that one could
possible imagine”) and everyone else experienced that psychological
shock on the day it was unleased on Hiroshima. As the tapestry
illustrates, the bomb transfixed popular culture for decades. From
America, we get Major Kong riding the bomb to oblivion at the end of Dr
Strangelove and the broken Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes;
from Japan, the anthropomorphised A-bomb Godzilla, which fashioned
national trauma into a pop icon.
Entering our own era, no imagery can rival the dread spectre of the
mushroom cloud. What, for example, does AI look like? The philosopher
Nick Bostrom illustrated the dangers of “unfriendly” AI with a deliberately
bathetic thought experiment called the Paperclip Maximiser: a machine
programmed solely to produce as many paperclips as possible might
destroy the world in pursuit of its goal, without any conscious malice.

Taselaar recruits Microsoft Office’s unlamented virtual assistant Clippy to
represent the ludicrous spectacle of apocalypse by accident. The image of
a Tesla Cybertruck swallowed by rising seas, meanwhile, represents the
connection between Big Tech and the climate emergency. This tragicomic
picture of 2020s hubris recalls T.S. Eliot’s famous prediction from ‘The
Hollow Men’: “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Christians who visited the Angers tapestry 650 years ago would have
found it more reassuring than depressing. Absent the promise of
paradise, one welcome feature of end-of-the-world stories in our own
time is black comedy, from Čapek’s War with the Newts to Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. “Laughter can only make people a little more
thoughtful,” argued Kubrick. For Hennequin de Bruges, there was nothing
funny about the Book of Revelation but End And is wildly colourful and
antic, peppered with wry jokes and lively connections for the attentive
viewer. The theme may be the death of everything but the work pulses
with life and humanity. After all, the end of the world is both the worst
thing that could happen and a cornerstone of popular entertainment. We
draw vicarious pleasure from visions of doom.
Even as Taselaar follows a roughly historical path, he collapses
chronology through his time-hopping visual omnivorousness: Battlestar
Galactica dancing with Bauhaus, viruses and bacteria teeming like flowers
in 15 th century millefleur tapestries, awesome majesty clashing with
mordant irony. Sweeping through the whole are comets, which might be
humanity’s most consistent menace — formerly agents of God and now
symbols of cosmic bad luck. Their flaming tails of red, yellow and orange
serve as the ribbons of time, tying our anxieties to those of our ancestors.
Like H. G. Wells’s time machine, End And hurls us through the earth’s
story, from the distant past to the dreaded future. It asks us to
contemplate simultaneously the perils unique to our times and the fears
that spring eternal; to throw ourselves into the tempestuous river of
history; to draw our own connections and hear our own echoes.
Apocalypse now, then and always.

Text by Dorian Lynskey

What does the end of the world look like? Today, most of the answers to
that question come from cinema but there is a much longer tradition of
visualising the final catastroph, from Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic
woodcuts to John Martin’s blockbuster canvases. The public’s appetite for
scenes of destruction has always been immense.
In the basement of a chateau in Angers, France, there hangs the
Apocalypse Tapestry, 100 metres long and 4.5 metres high, which depicts
84 scenes from the Book of Revelation. Commissioned in 1373 by Louis I,
the Duke of Anjou, and designed by the Flemish painter Hennequin de
Bruges, it illustrates the progress of the apocalypse in threads of red, blue
and gold. Inevitably, the retelling bore the real-life scars of the Hundred
Years War and the Black Death. And history was not done with it. During
the French revolution, which felt to many people like an apocalyptic event
that turned the world upside down, the tapestry was looted and cut into
pieces that could be used as floor mats or horse blankets. Thus the work
experienced its own process of destruction and regeneration.
Until the nineteenth century, representations of the end followed the
script laid down by John of Patmos. In Revelation (the English translation
of apocalypse), this lurid visionary established the characters, themes and
chain of events with which artists could play: the four horsemen, the
armoured angels, the lake of fire. And the book promised the righteous,
after all the pain and bloodshed, a release from human suffering. The
Angers tapestry concludes with John ascending to the New Jerusalem.
Science and secularism have since introduced or expanded other
possibilities, including machines, bombs, pandemics, natural catastrophes
and lethal visitations from the solar system, minus Revelation’s glorious
salvational finale. In these scenarios, the end really does mean the end.
As far back as 1893, the French astronomer and author Camille
Flammarion remarked that “our planet will be at a loss to choose among
so many modes of death.” Often, that choice is not even made because
dread of the end of the world does not have to cohere around a single
cause. The sociologist Richard G. Mitchell Jr spent two decades asking
Americans survivalists what exactly they thought they would be surviving
and found no consensus. The driver of survivalism is gut fear in search of
an objective justification.
That fear is not confined to off-the-grid eccentrics with bunkers full of
guns and tinned food. It can be felt throughout our culture, whether as an
obsession, an assumption, an urgent warning or a grim punchline. Like
millenarian Christians, many people feel on some level that this world is
so troubled and corrupted that it is beyond saving. It sometimes seems
impossible to imagine a future that is not worse than the present. Lines
from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (“Things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold”) have been quoted so often that they have become a truism.

And yet things have not fallen apart. The centre has held. The world
stubbornly refuses to end. Of course, the past is a limited guide to the
future but it does tell us that we are not a uniquely anxious or imperilled
generation.
In the summer of 2023, Koen Taselaar was invited to see the Angers
tapestry and consider creating a 21 st century response. “Everything
clicked for me,” he says. “Every generation seems to have their own
apocalyptic narrative.” The project would enable him to explore these
dreadful sentiments throughout history and use them to contextualise our
own concerns. Unlike a movie or a novel, bound by a single narrative, a
tapestry is the ideal format in which to represent the multiplicity of
possible world-ending events and our emotional responses to them.
Taselaar calls End And an “apocalyptic parade”. It is 19 metres long and
3.5 metres high, woven on a Jacquard machine so that it can be viewed
from both sides. The machine tells its own story. Patented by Joseph
Marie Jacquard in 1804, the process uses a chain of punched cards to
produce the design. Jacquard’s use of cards attracted the attention of the
British inventor Charles Babbage, whose work with Ada Lovelace laid the
foundation for computers, a technology that has inspired numerous
fictions about killer machines. When you’re dealing with a subject this
large, you find such interconnections everywhere. History itself comes to
seem like a vast tapestry of threads.
Following the arc of Revelation, the Angers tapestry employs John of
Patmos as its narrator. End And playfully assigns that role to a series of
creatures that have been resident on Earth long enough to serve as
eyewitnesses, even when they don’t have eyes, each one framing a
cataclysmic event inside a speech bubble. The story begins with the
ocean-dwelling glass sponge, believed to be the planet’s oldest extant
animal, while an Ammonoidea narrates the elimination of non-avian
dinosaurs 66 million years ago — a genuine extinction-level event.
While it is true to say that the whole world hasn’t ended yet, it has
effectively concluded for those at the epicentre of great disasters like the
eruptions of Vesuvius in 79 AD and Krakatoa in 1883. “Was this not for
them the end of the world?” Flammarion asked. In End And, we see the
invasion of the Americas, which led to the death of around 90% of the
population through war and disease, and the Lisbon earthquake, which
destroyed 85% of the city in 1755. The victims of the atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki also had good reason to perceive the
apocalypse. “I thought this was the end of Hiroshima — of Japan — of
humankind,” recalled one survivor.
Another strand of the tapestry is religious eschatology, which is not
confined to the Bible. It was the prophet Zoroaster who first reimagined

history as a linear experience, with a beginning, a middle and an end,
rather than an eternal cycle. The Norse had Ragnarök, the doom of the
gods. In the medieval section of the tapestry, we meet Joachim of Fiore,
the Italian monk who repopularised the imminence of the Christian
apocalypse in the late 12 th century. But prophecy is a tricky business. The
followers of the American preacher William Miller expected the Second
Coming of Christ in 1844 and called his non-appearance ‘The Great
Disappointment’. Their successors tend to steer clear of precise deadlines,
though they are no less convinced that Armageddon is right around the
corner.
The end of the world without God was made possible by Enlightenment
science and introduced to fiction by Lord Byron and Mary Shelley. In End
And, the writers are pelted by the endless rain of 1816’s “Year Without a
Summer”, a period of temporary climate change brought about by the
eruption of the volcano Tambora. Sheltering from the deluge in a rented
house on the shores of Lake Geneva, Byron wrote the unflinchingly bleak
poem ‘Darkness’ and Shelley conceived Frankenstein’s creature, which
proceeded to stomp through the imaginations of anyone concerned about
the anti-human menace of industry and artificial life. Taselaar presents
spiritual descendants like James Cameron’s Terminator and the
Maschinenmensch from 1927’s Metropolis in the style of a Bauhaus ballet,
Triadisches Ballett, which coincided with the birth of the robot in Karel
Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.
The great rupture in the history of the apocalyptic imagination was the
fiery genesis of the atomic bomb on 16 July 1945. Until that moment, the
general understanding was that the asteroid, the plague or the new ice
age would not be our fault but now, at last, humanity had discovered the
means to destroy itself in a matter of days. A new crime was made
possible: omnicide. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project
Colleagues perceived their invention’s world-ending potential during the
Trinity test (one called it “the nearest thing to doomsday that one could
possible imagine”) and everyone else experienced that psychological
shock on the day it was unleased on Hiroshima. As the tapestry
illustrates, the bomb transfixed popular culture for decades. From
America, we get Major Kong riding the bomb to oblivion at the end of Dr
Strangelove and the broken Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes;
from Japan, the anthropomorphised A-bomb Godzilla, which fashioned
national trauma into a pop icon.
Entering our own era, no imagery can rival the dread spectre of the
mushroom cloud. What, for example, does AI look like? The philosopher
Nick Bostrom illustrated the dangers of “unfriendly” AI with a deliberately
bathetic thought experiment called the Paperclip Maximiser: a machine
programmed solely to produce as many paperclips as possible might
destroy the world in pursuit of its goal, without any conscious malice.

Taselaar recruits Microsoft Office’s unlamented virtual assistant Clippy to
represent the ludicrous spectacle of apocalypse by accident. The image of
a Tesla Cybertruck swallowed by rising seas, meanwhile, represents the
connection between Big Tech and the climate emergency. This tragicomic
picture of 2020s hubris recalls T.S. Eliot’s famous prediction from ‘The
Hollow Men’: “Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Christians who visited the Angers tapestry 650 years ago would have
found it more reassuring than depressing. Absent the promise of
paradise, one welcome feature of end-of-the-world stories in our own
time is black comedy, from Čapek’s War with the Newts to Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. “Laughter can only make people a little more
thoughtful,” argued Kubrick. For Hennequin de Bruges, there was nothing
funny about the Book of Revelation but End And is wildly colourful and
antic, peppered with wry jokes and lively connections for the attentive
viewer. The theme may be the death of everything but the work pulses
with life and humanity. After all, the end of the world is both the worst
thing that could happen and a cornerstone of popular entertainment. We
draw vicarious pleasure from visions of doom.
Even as Taselaar follows a roughly historical path, he collapses
chronology through his time-hopping visual omnivorousness: Battlestar
Galactica dancing with Bauhaus, viruses and bacteria teeming like flowers
in 15 th century millefleur tapestries, awesome majesty clashing with
mordant irony. Sweeping through the whole are comets, which might be
humanity’s most consistent menace — formerly agents of God and now
symbols of cosmic bad luck. Their flaming tails of red, yellow and orange
serve as the ribbons of time, tying our anxieties to those of our ancestors.
Like H. G. Wells’s time machine, End And hurls us through the earth’s
story, from the distant past to the dreaded future. It asks us to
contemplate simultaneously the perils unique to our times and the fears
that spring eternal; to throw ourselves into the tempestuous river of
history; to draw our own connections and hear our own echoes.
Apocalypse now, then and always.

Text by Dorian Lynskey