A striking assemblage called "Space Trains," part of Mills' computer panel series, succeeds where its companion pieces sometimes don't. Various components – the outdated computer board itself, small square buttons with images of trains and planets, larger train cut-outs traversing the composition, and an industrial-strength glass box atop the panel (containing an open book with locomotives hurtling towards the heavens) – combine to form an arresting whole. Rather than appearing thrown together or tacked on, disparate elements seem synergistic. Sealed like a museum relic, the book has an especially outmoded and absurd quality above cirtuitry labeled "chilled water expansion tank," pressure" and winter circ." Most interesting is what the work conveys: an almost subliminal sense that technological innovations have little by little become littler. Modern technology used to belch steam and smoke and be BIG. Now it's small, if not invisible. The O. Winston Link meets-Captain Kirk quirkiness of "Space Trains" laughs in the face of a humorless machine aesthetic.
—Heather Joyner, Metropulse. "The Future of the Past", October 1997
