Based on the 1925 play Thomas Münzer
by the German playwright Berta Lask
this piece is a mock-heroic attempt
to create a voice for the voiceless machines,
a pathetic presage of the
future of automatic poetry.
The original play was written as a piece of pedagogic theatre
to instil communist ideas in the German proletariat.
It is the story of the radical German preacher Thomas Müntzer,
a utopian and proto-communist who was one of the leaders
of the peasants’ during the German Peasants’ War of 1525.
The text has been ‘written’ by taking Lask’s script,
scanning it, running the scan through
first text recognition software,
then an automatic translator.
This was then passed uncorrected
through text-to-speak software
to create the voice that was then turned into song.
The glitches and errors create an accidental poetry
that slips in and out of meaning and demonstrates
the failure of communication that is at the heart
of the tragedy of the human condition.
