On the etymology of a Krellmachine'

"It still gives me goose bumps when Commander Adams pushes Dr. Morbius down before the Krell machine that endowed him with superior intellect, which opened the flood gates of his subconscious to the power of the Krell machine: "Here. Here is where your mind was artificially enlarged. Consciously it still lacked the power to operate the Great Machine. But your subconscious had been made strong enough." Zowee!" - Anonymous IMDB Person

While the exact origins of the term Krellmachine are not identifiable, they can be localized in one particular text: The Forbidden Planet (1956).

In this film, which served as the inspiration for Roddenbery's Star Trek, a burley team of space guys lead by Lt. Frank Drebin travels to a planet where a team of scientists was left twenty years previously.

When they arrive, they find only two inhabitants. Dr. Morbius and his daughter Ann Francis are the sole remaining remnants of the expedition, though they seem to be living in high style served by Robbie teh Robot. The rest of the team had been mysteriously killed off years before.

There are already serviceable summaries on IMDB, and the film is available, so there is no need to summarize this film here. But there are important points for understanding a Krellmachine.

The Forbidden Planet was previously inhabited by a group of beings known as the Krell, who are mightily repressed folks. This repression, however, makes them really profitable; agitation and repressive frustration do that. In fact, they become so profitable that they develop enough power to perform two tasks important to the film.

First, the Krell are able to artificially enhance intelligence. They have developed a machine that increases the intelligence of the operator when he painfully interacts with the machine. Unfortunately,human operators of the machine, being less well-developed than the Krell, are unable to develop their intellect without causing physical harm to themselves.

Second, the Krell, apparently on the eve of their destruction, are able to use their technology create materializations of their every desire, merely by thinking.

Like all wishes, though, there is a heavy remainder which is unsaid in their technology; this is the key point to the plot. Initially, it seems that the ghosts of the Krell are haunting and killing the crew of the mission, when, in fact, it is Morbius' own fear of losing his daughter which provokes his subconscious, empowered with the ability to produce direct material effects via the Krellmachine.

The move describes a Krellmachine as simply a device that makes desire, even the subconscious desire that can never be stated, incarnate in a material embodiment.

New media operates on this same principle: our digital media technology enables us to produce texts that are radically fluid, that break the repressive expectations of an industrially based print culture.

This device makes possible a techno-surrealism that avows the mere symbolism of the exquisite corpse of form, that allows a virtual mark to be written, that allows the voice of the subconscious to be appropriated by the conscious.

As with the film, this device creates a kind of positive feedback loop, as the embodiment of desire dictates its immediate displacement.

In amplifiers, a positive feedback loop leads to a single signal growing in strength to the maximum output of the device which, at some point becomes open as the carrier for the noise written on that single point. Radio transmission is largely based on signal modulating the single, stabilized frequency of an oscillator.

In the film, this feedback loop is demonstrated when the Krellmachine, reveled to be the entire material of the planet, explodes in Morbius' inability to recognize the sacred, unnamable desire as his own.

In media production, the Krellmachine is the cybernetic point of man-machine interaction which simultaneously erases the specific exigencies of human being while opening up the blank space of noise behind which Real and private human experience could exist: the Krellmachine is the point where the human and machine feed into one another to create the carrier which is, especially in the exigencies of the end of capitalism, the only spot at which the noise that is a human can remain.