Yes, real Americans always spoke in code. They encapsulated themselves into technological clans. Codes were like bloodlines. So they could be friendly and helpful and polite but they quietly separated themselves when their codes did not flourish. Aquarius was obliged to recognize that if the machine seemed a functional object to the artist, an instrument whose significance was that it was there to be used—as a typewriter was used for typing a manuscript—so to the engineer it was the communication itself which was functional. The machine was the art.
