Peter Lichter’s new experimental horror film The Grey Machine explores the legend of a mysterious manuscript. In 1921, a previously unknown, untitled text resembling the writings of Edgar Allan Poe was found in a Boston antiquarian bookshop.
Two hundred pages of fragmentary manuscripts, consisting of fragments of sentences and words, were illustrated with technical drawings and long equations. It took an interdisciplinary team of Harvard professors twenty years to interpret the text, which they dubbed the Grey Machine.
Their hypothesis is that it is not a lost Poe manuscript, but something much more disturbing. A half-finished design for an automaton: a machine that would attempt to model Poe’s mind.
The unknown creators (presumably a techno-spiritualist cult of enthusiasts) were not content with Poe’s left-behind texts, but sought to bestow electric immortality on the writer’s spirit.
The mechanism by which the Grey Machine worked remained undeciphered until 1994. But then a Polish electrical engineer, Stefan Krol, presented the first and only prototype of the machine at an international conference on artificial intelligence at the Technical University of Budapest, which was only switched on for a few minutes on a total of five occasions.
Péter Lichter’s film is a tribute to these five mysterious film sequences. The Grey Machine will have several screenings at ISBN between 1 and 18 of October, where visitors will also be able to see an exhibition of the film with Márió Nemes Z., and macskalány x ingatlan.