In modern philosophy, nature and technology are understood as an aspectal difference. They do not stand for different subjects, but for different perspectives on the same subject. The change of view is also captured by the metaphorics of the theater stage and backstage. Depending on where the gaze wanders, one experiences wonderful effects or gains an insight into how these effects come about. Examples of these are the theater machine, which wants to draw attention to the stage, and the machine theater, which is a textbook that wants to lead step by step to an insight into how effects come about. At the interface between the theater machines and machine theater there is an economy of the miraculous and of habit. The essay reconstructs exemplary stages of this history up to current computational models that are rather regarded as theater machines.