Machines produce only machines. This is increasingly true as the virtual technologies are becoming more perfect. At a certain level of machine-ness, of immersion in virtual machinery, there is no more distinction between man and machine. The machine is on both sides of the interface. You may indeed be merely the space of the machine now: man has become the virtual reality of the machine, its mirror operator. This has to do with the very essence of the screen. One cannot look “through” the screen as if it were a looking-glass. The dimensions of time itself merge there in “real time.” The characteristic of any virtual surface is first of all to be there, empty and thus likely to be filled with anything. It is left to you to interact in real time with the vacuum.

Machines produce only machines. The texts, images, films, speeches, and programmes that come out of computers are machine products. They have the features of machine products: they are artificially expanded, facelifted by the machine; the movies are full of special effects, the texts full of lengthy passages and repetitions, which are the consequences of the malicious will of the machine to function at all costs (for that is its passion), and of the operator’s fascination with the limitless opportunity of operating the machine. Hence the wearisome character of all this violence and “pornographied” sexuality, which are merely special effects of violence and sex that are no longer even fantasized by humans. This pure mechanic violence does not affect us any longer. Hence all these texts which can be regarded as the works of “intelligent” virtual agents, whose only act is the act of programming. The rest unfolds in a purely automatic fashion. This has nothing to do with automatic writing (écriture automatique), which played on the magical telescoping of words and concepts, whereas all we are left with here is the automatic programming of all the possibilities. Forward, the machine design of the body, the make-up of the text and the image. This is called cybernetics: controlling the image, the text, the body from within, as it were, by playing with its genetic code or modalities. It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which triggers in the operator this dizziness of interactivity with his/her own object and, at the same time, the anxious dizziness of not having reached the technological limits of his/her possibilities. In fact, the virtual machine is speaking you, it is thinking you.