In "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers", Hayles makes a distinction between human and post-human in the development of technologies –in the case of books from print to digital. The experience and the representation of the body changes from the floating to the flickering signifier, that is from a Lacanian paradyme of presence/absence to the contemporary one of pattern/randomness. But the different stages of mediation operated in the Annuals locates them in a hybrid space, where the materiality of the signifier is still prominent and, since the encoding/decoding process of information is enacted through the mediation, the viewer/narrator’s position becomes technology itself. Thus, despite its corporeality, the Annual is inhabiting not only a space of coupling between language and sexuality, as in Lacanian terms, but also what Hayles calls the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and machine.

The coupling of portraits and lines intensifies the sense of mediation of information:

The materiality is common to all three elements but the shift in significance due to the passage through three different forms of mediation works at the same time as disembodiment, as with what Hayles, in The Life Cycle of Cyborgs, calls the post-human condition (321). At every step, the external viewer/reader has to produce new signification departing from the one produced by the preceding mediator. The reader of the Annual reads the portrait through the gaze of the painter and through the shift in meaning produced by the poet’s lines. The poet creates his/her narrative in the displacement operated on the signified by the act of portrayal itself (signifier). In this way, the Annuals draw attention to the act of mediation in signification.