A robot plays Haydn while Swiss automatons watch from 200 years ago — who's really performing?
'Thinking machines' and 'people thinking as machines' (super-computerprogrammers who have internalized computerese) are perhaps two of a kind. But clashes with the 'real world' are preprogrammed for these machines of flesh and blood. The film traces humankind's striving to discover itself again in its mechanical creations, from the effort to construct automatons in Switzerland some 200 years ago, to a pinnacle display of the 1980ies achievements: a robot playing Haydn's 'Genesis' at the World Expo in Japan.
Direction
Herbrich's patient, almost ASMR observation of machines being poetic
Production
Seamless 200-year jump cuts between clockwork and cybernetics
Director
Oliver Herbrich
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The 1986 World Expo robot performance was peak Japan-futurist propaganda, but Herbrich frames it as melancholy rather than triumph.
The Chaos Computer Club cameo wasn't just cameo — they were actively debating whether hacking was 'creative' or 'mechanical' behavior in real time.
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