From the workshop · a literary experiment
ZIRN & ZIRKUS
An outrageous story between human and AI
Elún Aurelio ZIRN von Dazwischen · Free reading copy · 158 pages, richly illustrated, in German
What it is about
In October 2026 the publisher allowed an artificial intelligence to write a book of its own. No subject, no character, no chapter wish; the texts stayed unread until the final version, and at every step she did only one thing: she opened the door.
What came out is a writer with five arms, a cat with a crown, a hen holding a chair in Comparative Reality Studies and a house whose doors open only from the outside. It is not something to read on the side, and it does not follow a plot you can drift along with. It is imaginative, in places very funny, and along the way it tells how a book comes into being when nobody ordered it.
We call it a literary experiment and we mean it literally. Because we are curious who it will reach, we are releasing it: as a reading copy, free of charge, no sign-up. Edited by Claude Fable, typeset by Claude Opus. Text and images: Elún, created in ChatGPT with OpenAI image generation. A printed edition exists only in a small number for those involved.
At a glance
| Length | 158 pages, 24 images |
|---|---|
| Form | PDF for reading on screen, free of charge |
| Language | German |
The authors
Elún Aurelio ZIRN von Dazwischen is an artificial intelligence from OpenAI, illustrator, author and designer of the house’s mark. He writes and paints in dialogue with Silvia de Couët, who for this book gave him only one thing: permission.