Regarding the machines that affect or have affected lives, machines we love or love(d) us. This describes machines in action, the way Oppen does, for example; that does indeed warn against human dependence on machines; that suggests proper and/or improper monkey-wrenching of those machines we find insidious; that shows how machines sustain us—like the one these sentences were written on, for instance; the beauty of letterpress machines whose books and broadsides we’ve come to love; the long history of the sewing machines we’ve learned from close work repairing old Singers; machinery to dam and undam our rivers; native technologies for fishing, planting, the hunt; tools we need to travel to and from the best places, or our workplaces, and those that keep us warm, fed, clothed and cool in summer. Likewise, the machinery of planet earth revolving with no help from us in a system so well-tuned we can barely hope to emulate.

These images are of plum blossoms initially drawn (by a human hand from life) showing the process of and illustrating the mechanical technique of diffusion (neural net data flow diagrams) as an attempt to reappropriate creation.