Thames & Hudson, London, 2006

Swamped by giant billboards featuring the overly familiar faces beamed night and day into American homes, a group of tourists is quickly bussed through the dazzling electronic emporium known to all the world as Times Square. The puny faces of the ‘real’ people in this masquerade are crammed into a narrow band (the deck of the bus), unable to compete in the attractiveness sweepstakes with the panorama of super glamorous faces squeezing them from above and below. How odd these ‘real’ faces appear to our eyes, already accustomed to the new standard of face. New! Improved! Homogenized!

William A. Ewing

The technology that lifted man out of both his environment and his body, allowing him to enter and leave limbo at will, has now become so casual, so environmental, we make that trip with the numbness of commuters, our eyes unseeing, the mystery of self-confrontation and self-discovery gone.

Edmund Snow Carpenter, 1972