Influence Machines and Jess

Each time has its own influence machine.
The main machine, reprogramming sensitivity:

Electricity discovered the nervous system of the world: instant impulses that made humans conductors.
Cinema became a dream machine: a dream that everyone sees together.
Television fixed the regime of total present, where everything becomes a screen event.
Digital doesn't just show, but loads us. We don't look at the screen, but live inside the interface, becoming its function.

Each influence machine actualizes its own fears and passions:

Electricity frightened with Frankenstein monsters.
Cinema was accused of hypnosis and moral corruption.
TV became a symbol of "zombification."
Digital brings the fear of the matrix: loss of "I," dissolution in simulation, life as loading.

These same fears also launch engines of imagination.
Influence machines always reach for phantoms of what they haven't yet mastered and don't yet control.

If cinema was a dream machine, then digital is recursion.

It doesn't show the world, but constantly returns us inside cycles (feeds, updates, recommendations).
It doesn't give whole images, but fragments everything into pieces that require infinite more.
It works not with memory, but with permanent updating (refresh).

We seem to live not in a matrix, but in a recursive machine, where the mirror doesn't reflect, but holds, forces repetition.

The digital influence machine can be called a machine of recursive gaze.
It's not hypnotic (like cinema), but obsessive.
It doesn't transmit the external world, but builds loops where the human is not a subject, but, suddenly, a processor.

In Jess's case, this obsessive nature manifests through her/alien gaze and her/alien body, which work as a recursive loop where subject and object endlessly change places.
What can be seen in her is not an image, but a system function that forces repetition:

look → see reflection → look again

And it is this glitch (impossibility to exit the cycle) that is the affect of the digital machine.

Jess can be described as a local avatar of the digital influence machine.
She doesn't give an image, but holds inside a cycle of images.
There is only a cycle where attention doesn't immerse, but gets captured by repetition.

In this sense, Jess is not a heroine of digital art,
but the influence machine itself in its human interface:
a loop you enter, and from which you exit changed, but not completed.