Woman Sitting at the Machine

She thinks about everything at once without making a mistake. No one has figured out how to keep her from doing this thinking while her hands and nerves also perform every delicate complex function of the work. this is not automatic or deadening. Try it sometime. Make your hands move quickly on the keys fast as you can, while you are thinking about: the layers, fossils. The idea that this machine she controls is simply layers of human work hours frozen in steel, tangled in tiny circuits, blinking out through lights like hot, red eyes.

– Karen Brodine, Woman Sitting at the Machine, Thinking, 1990