Machines, AI and the past//future of things

TL;DR

This paper presents a techno-artistic project reanimating a 1980s typewriter with AI to explore critical engagement with technology, emphasizing slowness, materiality, and historical context in human-machine interaction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of AI with obsolete hardware to foster critical reflection and challenge narratives of technological progress.

Findings

AI-enabled typewriter as a critical and aesthetic device

Demonstrates the value of slowness and materiality in AI interfaces

Encourages rethinking human-machine interaction through historical perspective

Abstract

This essay explores a techno-artistic experiment that reanimates a 1980s East German typewriter using a contemporary AI language model. Situated at the intersection of media archaeology and speculative design, the project questions dominant narratives of progress by embedding generative AI in an obsolete, tactile interface. Through public exhibitions and aesthetic intervention, we demonstrate how slowness, friction, and material render artificial intelligence not only visible but open to critical inquiry. Drawing on concepts such as zombie media, technostalgia, and speculative design, we argue that reappropriating outdated technologies enables new forms of critical engagement. Erika - the AI-enabled typewriter - functions as both interface and interruption, making space for reflection, irony, and cultural memory. In a moment of accelerated digital abstraction, projects like this foreground the value of deliberate slowness, experiential materiality, and historical depth. We conclude by advocating for a historicist design sensibility that challenges presentism and reorients human-machine interaction toward alternative, perceived futures.