The world in Hannes Bajohr's (Berlin, Miami) is all that has fallen to an AI fed with four contemporary novels: a nameless programmer who checks lists to see who is dead and who is not. Agents of the so-called Ãää company who want to stir up fears. The founding of the Low Congress on Sylt. Kieferling and Teichenkopf. Life viruses and co-yoga. Words of bad luck, six-lame language and THE DIFFERENCE. What is generated from this is narrative as a mere surface phenomenon, the crazy fever dream of a language model that simulates love stories and conspiracy narratives in order to – in defiance of the logic of reality and grammar – immediately fall into its own trap, hit the wall and even get rid of the last causal bracket. But instead of finally waking up from this, Bajohr's AI is spurred on and on until even the robots' familiar dream of electric sheep has to burst, giving literature a completely new framework.
Hannes Bajohr, born in Berlin in 1984, is a philosopher and literary scholar and currently a postdoc at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Basel. He has published extensively on the history of ideas, political philosophy and theories of the digital. Most recently published by August Verlag: Schreibenlassen. Texte zur Literatur im Digitalen (2022).
"A novel like '(Berlin, Miami)' [is], at least for now, extraordinary proof of the insight that Bajohr also subscribes to: ‘No one ever writes alone’."
– Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung
