Why Contemporary Artists Worship Tech

A collection of black-and-white photographs by anonymous French soldiers, of their fellows wearing gas masks and other alien-looking equipment from trench warfare, shows us men who feel that they have become more like machines, machine parts, than human beings. American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd’s facial prostheses from the same period make the point more literally: the machines of war have stripped men of their faces; the face of the future is a fusion of wound and prosthetic.