The idea for this project was inspired in part by the sto­ry of “The Turk”, a chess-play­ing automa­ton of the 18th cen­tu­ry, made by Wolf­gang von Kem­pe­len. It toured Europe, beat­ing the likes of Napoleon Bona­parte and Ben­jam­in Franklin. It was lat­er revealed that this “machine” was not an automa­ton at all, but was in fact a chess mas­ter hid­den in a spe­cial compart­ment control­ling its oper­a­tions. Like­wise, the Mech­a­nische Postkarte allows humans to help the machi­nes of today per­form a task for which they are not suit­ed.

Mech­a­nis­che Postkarte, Ger­man for mechan­i­cal post­card, is a project cre­at­ed by Bri­an Bixby. Bri­an Bixby is a visu­al artist, film mak­er and free­lance photog­ra­pher. This project was cre­at­ed in Weimar, Ger­many, which is where the orig­i­nal Bauhaus Uni­ver­si­ty was formed and con­tin­ues to this day.