Sublime

The machine, as Picabia put it in one of his titles (plate 28), was La Fille Née Sans Mère, 1916–17, the Daughter Born without a Mother – a modern counterpart to the myth of the Virgin Birth, in which Christ, the son, was born without a father.

The Mechanical Turk is like The Wizard of Oz’s man behind the curtain—an all-knowing, uncanny entity that is ultimately revealed as something much more mundane and comprehensible. The machine and the trick reinforce each other. With its doubled deceptions, the Turk is able, as Walter Benjamin wrote reflecting on the device in a 1940 essay, to “win

la Machinerie est-elle une étape ou le symptôme d’une crise, d’une rupture d’équilibre, d’une défaillance des hautes facultés désintéressées de l’homme, au bénéfice de ses appétits ? Voilà une question que personne n’aime encore à se poser. Je ne parle pas de l’invention des Machines, je parle de leur multiplication prodigieuse, à quoi rien ne