 The Empty Secret A tearing, a breaking, a smashing. The rumbling of heavily tumbling rocks. Sounds, loud sounds which, in combination with the images, evoke the spirit of the machine and extract the computer s soul. But not, as was so often the case before, for the purpose of dissecting the spirit, exorcising it in a clumsy way, to say nothing of raping it in euphemistic esotericism. We are permitted to see the soul, but are not allowed to touch it. What had only been announced will now be made real. The tearing, the breaking into the image. And truly a breaking into the image, not some other presumed new space. No veiled escape from the world of images, this is the ultimate hack: a break-in, the break-in of the millennium. And with this long-essential procedure, art is practically torn away from the self-proclaimed creative heads, making their arrogance and presumptuousness clear to them. The presumed secret of the mimics has been revealed: It does not exist, it is empty. Sounds, loud sounds which herald new secrets, true secrets. And we realize within these elusive truths, because the secrets here are nothing less: LOUD is sometimes not LOUD ENOUGH. (Thomas Ballhausen)