This book is based on an electronic media installation by Toni Dove which investigated the human form within an historical and psychoanalytical context. Inspired by the work of hypnotist Anton Mesmer along with a range of texts including those by Sigmund Freud and French symbolist Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Dove explores the way the spiritual and the technical were drawn together during the nineteenth century as progressions were made in science, psychology and technology. Dove uses imagery that evokes X-rays, cinema and the gothic novel to create figures which are part human, part mechanical, part mystical. The book is bound between boards of punched metal with jewel-like iridescent paper glittering through the holes creating the effect of something that's both machine-like and precious at the same time. Inside, text and images are printed in different shades of metallic ink with layers of transparent and opaque papers creating a densely visual effect, mirroring the multitude of interweaving ideas that the book explores.

"Mesmer ... is a 'philosophical toy' which makes reference to those machines which were the precursors of cinema and to the gothic novel, a genre which helped give this piece its form ... Our relationship to the machine and to ourselves is inscribed in the images we create of automatons, androids, robots and cyborgs. I have come to think of this project itself as an android or robot" -- Artist's statement p. [4].

"... first mounted as a computerized slide and sound installation in the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage in 1990 ... It was presented as a radio piece in the 1991 New American radio series and as an essay in the summer of 1992 edition of the N.Y.U. drama journal."-- Colophon.

Texts by Freud, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and others.