NMD AND THE IMAGE MACHINE
Many years before Verdonck’s dramaturgy, Shikata Yukiko’s description of dumb type’s mediated scenography as an ‘image machine’ functioned to denote the extent to which this company’s scenic design, populated with digital video projections and animated with digital lighting, assumed increasing importance in their work and became influential beyond it [...]
These works are literally image machines focusing on the intimacy of the encounter with death and disappearance, and on the many ways we are completely reliant on technology to manage both the interface with daily life and the relentless medical interfacing associated with illness and ultimately with death. The dramaturgy of the installations consists in the way the spatial and intermedial composition translates the idea of the impermanence and fragility of life at the threshold into an affective encounter between the image and the viewer.

Peter Eckersall, Helena Grehan & Edward Scheer, Cue Black Shadow Effect: The New Media Dramaturgy Experience, (13)