The casual associations between Joyce and certain collaborators with De Stijl remind us that he was working in an artistic environment that extended beyond the world of letters, and that much of the artistic experimentation taking place around him was concerned with the forms of a newly constructed and functional modernity. The celebration of the machine in the pages of De Stijl finds an inherently aesthetic value in the forms of industrial production. In Joyce there is a dialogic relation between human bodies and machines, in which human movement owes as much to machine production as machines owe to human design. Joyce's work brings out the point of tension between human desire and technical invention in a manner symptomatic of modernity at large.