Message (1988) is a film animation that Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (1951, Antwerp) developed from drawings made at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Free University (VUB) in Brussels. Van Kerckhoven had been using soft-core pornographic images of women in her work since the late 1970s and subsequently began to translate some of her drawings into film animations. She was given the opportunity to access computers and build upon her broader practice of merging the erotic with machine fetishism: ‘in 1976 . . . a friend, Luc Steels, asked if I could make images to enlighten the jury for his PhD thesis, since it was quite dry material. I’d always been interested in—seduced by—technological solutions and that showed in the drawings I was making in that period. Many of new and groundbreaking theories have something sexy about them. I am attracted to these thoughts, words and new worlds... He subsequently invited me to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Brussels that he started in 1983. As I entered the lab, I felt the future was happening in an atmosphere where women could work on equal grounds. Not at all like the depressing reality in the art world, where women had hardly a place—the examples of women I could relate to in recent art history were almost non-existent. In the laboratory they didn’t make a difference between intellectual human beings, whether they were male or female. The inspiration I got from consulting books and articles in their library motivated me totally to explore new worlds in the domain of art.’