Finally with the computer as incarnation of the machine, our love for technology can cease its restless and previously unfulfilled wanderings and find a comfortable place. Heim depicts these encounters not as a ravaging desire gone wild, sprouting up in odd places or producing monstrous offspring, but in homely and familial terms.

As well, there are more theoretical attempts to come to terms with what Michael Heim describes as the 'erotic ontology of cyberspace' (59). There is already an abundance of literature around the erotics of cyberspace, documenting and detailing encounters of virtual sex fantasies and romance. What I want to touch upon is the sense in which a desire for oneness inhabits our relations to and through the technological. Rather than being the object of love here, technology acts as the conduit of emotion, or stronger still, it is the love relation itself, bringing the two together as one. Needless to say, the good citizens of Hong Kong have not allowed any rigid criteria for genetic engineering to get in the way of the progeny such a machine allows, creating such monstrous couplings as the baby 'cat-human', achieved by a sitter coupling with their pet.

Its Japanese manufacturers, while obviously cashing in on the novelty value, nevertheless list the advantage it allows for future matrimonial selection based around the production of a suitable aesthetic. For the output of this imaging machine is none other than a picture of the combined features of the two sitters, 'morphed' together by computer software to produce a technological child. But rather than one subject, it requires a couple, in fact the couple, in order to do its work of digital reproduction. Called simply The Love Machine, it functions like a photo booth, dispensing on-the-spot portraits 1. A new device, sure to inspire technological bedazzlement, has been installed in Hong Kong shopping malls.

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