The meeting of a choir and machines is a perfect metaphor for our contemporary society. Flesh bodies and plastic boxes. Voices and lines of code. The warmth of the profoundly human and the coldness of the computer executive face to face: a common caricature of this restless world beyond our understanding.

But how hot is the human heart? At a time of the most severe inequalities, humanity seems never to have been so unjust with itself, throwing itself into various patriotic, communitarian and religious wars, spreading obscurantism of all kinds and immeasurable suffering. The coldness of the human who massacres is of burning topicality. Flesh charred by bombs, the consequences of the great game of a power that has never been so icy.

And is the computer executive so cold? When families communicate their love from one end of the world to the other by satellite, when all the world's knowledge is accessible under the thumb, when conversational AIs are needed to fill the emotional void left by one's own, when connected sex toys make us cum, when programs generate paintings, poems, symphonies; these machines compensate for the coldness of our existences with a fire that no longer seems so artificial. It's impossible to deny our dependence on all these "zeros" and "ones", just as it's impossible to determine which of man and machine dominates the other.

Of course, the computing machine bears no responsibility whatsoever. It has only one pitfall, that of all tools: serving the interests of those who manipulate them. To play on these facts is to highlight them. To have fun with horror is to denounce it. This playful and moving Pièce Perdue uses the voice of its choir and electroacoustic equipment as pretexts for as many possible metaphors between man, machine and contemporary society, and the power games that shake it. A lost piece like a cathartic "lost ball" against our impotence.