In the 1910s, the French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia made a series of playful, enigmatic works combining machine imagery with allusions to human sexuality. As opposed to the triumphalist narratives of technological progress that were widespread in the early twentieth century, Picabia’s “erotic” machines appear in a state of whimsical dysfunction: they seem to reflect the foibles of human nature, rather than transcend them. Picabia’s images gently mocked ideologies of masculinist militarism at a moment when Europe was engulfed in the mechanized violence of the First World War. This sardonic approach to political and social currents was typical of the Dadaist spirit, with which Picabia was associated in New York, Paris, and Zürich. The words trailing across this image read, “invite . . . ignore . . . human body,” a message of failed desire and frustrated intent rather than of technological mastery.