About

The oral storytelling tradition was, for centuries, almost the only means of passing knowledge, experience, and emotion down through generations. In times before books and electronic recordings, on long winter nights or after days of hard work, people would gather around the fire; there, warmed by both its glow and the tales they shared, they found a sense of belonging and a collective memory.

These oral transmissions were not only a way to share information, but also a communal act of living together, remembering, and forging meaning.

Over time, first printed books and then electronic records entered the scene, and as Walter Benjamin pointed out, the voice of the traditional storyteller gradually fell silent. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Benjamin explains that with the rise of the novel, the vivid experiences once so integral to oral storytelling became frozen in text, and thus “the wisdom of the dying” was lost. While the novel takes shape as a fixed entity committed to writing, the dynamic, fluid, and communal nature of oral narratives fades into the background.

Stories, once shaped by a shared memory within a community, became works experienced in isolation, confined within the closed universe of an individual author. In this transition, the living, participatory quality of storytelling gave way to a static product that the reader consumes alone.

In parallel, Gilbert Simondon spoke of a “technological milieu” that emerges within technological objects. This milieu does not merely influence modes of production, but also transforms aesthetics, perception, and processes of meaning-making. Electronic recordings, audiovisual media, and now large language models (LLMs) powered by artificial intelligence form part of this ecosystem. Within the framework Simondon outlines, technological objects and their networks are not just tools; they establish aesthetic norms and horizons of understanding.

Today, LLMs, with the texts they generate, broaden our understanding of stories on one hand, while imposing their own unique aesthetic forms on the other. These models reconfigure narrative traditions, weaving together stories from different times, geographies, and genres. In doing so, they break free from the dominance of a single voice and hold the potential to reawaken the flickering lights of a communal memory.

Oral stories are products of a living memory that directly engages the human mind. A single story may carry a particular meaning, but a network of stories—interwoven narratives—reflects the brain’s complex world of significance. Historically, this network of stories enabled people to understand each other, to draw on collective imagination, and to preserve experiences in a shared memory. Today, LLMs can process thousands of narratives to activate a similar multiplicity of meaning. In this new, lexicon-like technological realm, they can inspire a feeling of closeness and engagement akin to what our ancestors felt. The spirit of those tales once passed down through hands, tongues, and tones of voice now finds new expression on this modern technological stage.

This project aims not merely to produce any given text, but to rekindle that collective experience our forebears once had, using today’s technological capabilities. By harnessing LLMs, we open the door once again to the multi-layered, interconnected universe of the human mind—transcending borders between different places, times, and genres. In this way, we strive to hear once more that vanishing voice Benjamin lamented, to craft a new aesthetic of storytelling within Simondon’s technological milieu, and most importantly, to rediscover that profound sense of connection our ancestors once knew.