Die Geschichtenmaschine / The Story Machine

A pamphlet from 1995, from the Author's "political" phase. The pamphlet describes a hypothetical machine, a story-telling machine, a machine retelling history, and a machine serving as guide and teacher. It tries to develop a convincing concept of the possible political viewpoints this machine would maintain, how it would represent the system under which auspices it was constructed, to which degree the machine's logical system would influence its retelling and reconstruction of all stories or narratives, and how unfinished human products would react to this machine, caring for them and explaining the world to them. It derived its initial motivation from the author's idea that machines would be the better teachers for human beings, because they, as the machines they are, following a clearly prescribed and emotionless method instead on instincts and heavily emotionalized ingrained ideas about how to best enforce results, would always replace authority with patience. The German reader would perhaps be able to recognize that the ductus of the text, as well as the weighing of aspects and the choice of references, is heavily influenced to the point of plagiarism by the writings of filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge, while the concentration on human-machine interaction was most markedly derived from the writings of scientists and authors like Adele Goldberg, Alan Kay, Seymour Papert, and many different books on experimantal projects on computer-assisted learning, mostly from the 1970's and 1980's. It seems that a certain clear-sighted focus on the computer's mind-enhancing capabilities was later replaced by more profit-oriented ideas about the computer as entertainer. For an enlarged view please click on the images.