Martin Burckhardt


Martin Burckhardt is a German author and cultural theorist.

Career

As a young author he was engaged in the field of audio art, creating and producing experimental audio pieces, often in cooperation with composer and musician Johannes Schmoelling. Parallel to his artistic work his first theoretical sketches unfolded. As a consequence of his first book he started teaching at various universities, at Humboldt University, then at Free University Berlin. From 1997-2000 he worked as a curator for the Government of Hamburg, organizing Interface V, a symposium and exhibition of computer culture. On 4 November 1995, he and his brother, Wolfram Burckhardt, founded the cultural publishing house Kulturverlag Kadmos.
From 2000 onwards Burckhardt delved into the field of programming and Game design, an interest that found its resonance in an installation in the USER–exhibition of Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. In 2011 he created the online game TwinKomplex, which interweaves film, literary narrative, photography, design and game to form a new genre of transmedia storytelling.
After 2013 Burckhardt concentrated on writing. In 2014 he published the science fiction novel Score, which depicts a society that solely relies on a gamified economy, followed a year later by a meditation on the Boolean formula. In 2017 his book on the Philosophy of the Machine appeared.
Burckhardt is a regular contributor for intellectual magazines like Lettre International and Merkur. For the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he writes a series on the history of the computer, portraying outstanding computer pioneers.
Burckhardt's work has been translated into Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, English and Chinese. His book All and Nothing. A Digital Apocalypse is published by MIT Press.

Works