— Thank you for the kind words — :-) — And thank you for the bonus This telling fragment of chat, extracted from Cécile B. Evans’s Working on What the Heart Wants (2016), informed my experience of this multichannel video installation, which records a group of humans interacting with and through machines, across timelines and deadlines, to collaborate on a visual project involving the construction of a new so-called person called HYPER; “a system that is a woman,” writes the artist on her website. The users’ exchanges involve technical matters relating to CGI and rendering, along with codified online expressions of feelings (emoticons and adjectives conveying happiness, friendliness, satisfaction), as well as undisclosed amounts of money. Wages and invoices, often popping up in the live-streamed conversations, act as reminders of the bare fact that, although invisible and anonymous, the bodies operating behind the machinic screens are real. Their individual abilities are purposefully mined and rewarded in accordance with their performance. In postindustrial times, etiquette and authenticity are conditioned by the prompt delivery of “services.” And art proves no exception: by “disclosing” her supposedly daily progresses as fully visible and shareable material, Evans maximizes the emotionally charged but otherwise dead time of production. …