The 35-year-old Berliner has to his credit the Korsakow System, a unique story telling software, which he uses to put forth his interactive narratives. Thalhofer, however, plays down inventing the software. He merely attributes it to coincidence. “It took several years to develop it. However, it happened because in college I was working a lot with computers. With Korsakow, I can break a story, or many of them at one time, into fragments. The software recognises the common strands in those stories and links them together. This makes conclusions highly open to interpretation,” he says.

Thalhofer uses this method to tell traditional linear tales to soul stirring ones. Today, at Max Mueller, Mumbai, he is showing three of them 13tershop, Love Story Project and Forgotten Flags. All of them show his preoccupation with the idea of life in different circumstances. “For 13tershop, a colleague, Kolja Mensing and I stayed in a mall for a month.”

There are several other stories; like the one he did with Bedouins when he wanted to know about love in the desert and the one he did on a 40-day long travel trip across the United States. “In Cairo, I was working with Mahmoud Hamdy. It was such a rich cultural experience. Here I was, an English-speaking German, with Mahmoud, who is very fluent in Urdu. Although we had the same hardware in our heads, we’d say things that neither would understand. Our stories broke that barrier for us. We both explored the idea of love in a desert, met Bedouins, it was fantastic.”