The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” was designed by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus. It is a drawing machine that illustrates a never-ending story by translating words of text into patent drawings.

Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext.

The machine attempts to show how new visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.

Basic procedure
1. The program downloads and parses a part of the text of a recent best-selling book.
2. The algorithm eliminates all insignificant words like “I”, “and”, “to”, “for”, “the”, etc. The remaining words and their combinations are the keywords for the patent drawings.
3. Using the keywords in chronological order, it searches for the key-patents
4. The program now searches for a path connecting the found key patents. This is possible because every patent contains several references to older patents – the so-called “prior art”.
5. All key-patents and the patents connecting them semantically are arranged and printed.
6. Goto step 1.