It would be futile to resist the feeling that the marvelous curls of smoke, photographed by Étienne-Jules Marey between 1899 and 1901, first elicit from us. We have the impression of witnessing a pure beauty in the process of making, unmaking, and remaking itself incessantly before our eyes. It is a supreme flow—images of flow and a flow of images all at once—from which approximately fifty instants have been randomly “drawn,” all formed differently and likewise admirable. Such simple beauty...

Against all earlier hopes, the survival of mankind in and after the modern industrial age has turned out not to be automatable. On the contrary, it entirely depends on the continued active restoration of its material living conditions. Gilbert Simondon describes this connection between humans and their machines in the 1950s in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects as a tragically truncated, restricted, and limiting way of living for both because, “man’s alienation vis à vis the machine...