Digital poetry actually emerged from the orbit of concrete poetry in the late 1950s in Stuttgart. In fact, the deployment of computers for the artificial generation of poetry was nothing but the logical consequence of the theoretical reflections of an important figure of the concrete poetry movement. One could even say that it was the product of certain aspects of concrete poetry driven to their utmost extremes – which closes the circle rather nicely.
The German scholar, philosopher and poet Max Bense was one of the leading figures of the concrete poets of the Stuttgarter Gruppe, and an important international mediator between various different national groups and factions. He was preoccupied with the study of philosophy, mathematics, technology and theory of science as well as with information theory, semiotics and cybernetics. Bense is certainly the most radical pursuer of objectivity and scientific exactitude, but Eugen Gomringer too emphasised the importance of method, system and structure, and experiments with stochastic, permutational and combinatorial structures can also be observed in many other concrete oeuvres, such as Franz Mon’s and those of the Wiener Gruppe.
In his Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik. Grundlegung und Anwendung in der Texttheorie from 1969, Bense describes “aesthetic states” of texts as defined by their degree of unexpected, surprising and non-trivial occurrence of words. This notion is a direct transfer of Claude E. Shannon’s definition of information as “unexpected, unpredictable news” into the realms of the aesthetic.
To my knowledge, Bense and his students were the very first ever to deploy computers for purely aesthetic purposes in order to produce stochastic, machine-generated poetry. They deployed the random function of computers for the generation of “unlikely, highly selective and non-trivial” sequences – which is Bense’s defintion of what makes a text aesthetic rather than functional. In 1959, in the computer lab of the ‘Technische Hochschule’, Theo Lutz fed vocabulary taken from Franz Kafka’s Das Schloss into a Zuse Z 22, and wrote a program determining several rules of combination, and thus generated the first artificial, chance determined literary text.
The German scholar, philosopher and poet Max Bense was one of the leading figures of the concrete poets of the Stuttgarter Gruppe, and an important international mediator between various different national groups and factions. He was preoccupied with the study of philosophy, mathematics, technology and theory of science as well as with information theory, semiotics and cybernetics. Bense is certainly the most radical pursuer of objectivity and scientific exactitude, but Eugen Gomringer too emphasised the importance of method, system and structure, and experiments with stochastic, permutational and combinatorial structures can also be observed in many other concrete oeuvres, such as Franz Mon’s and those of the Wiener Gruppe.
In his Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik. Grundlegung und Anwendung in der Texttheorie from 1969, Bense describes “aesthetic states” of texts as defined by their degree of unexpected, surprising and non-trivial occurrence of words. This notion is a direct transfer of Claude E. Shannon’s definition of information as “unexpected, unpredictable news” into the realms of the aesthetic.
To my knowledge, Bense and his students were the very first ever to deploy computers for purely aesthetic purposes in order to produce stochastic, machine-generated poetry. They deployed the random function of computers for the generation of “unlikely, highly selective and non-trivial” sequences – which is Bense’s defintion of what makes a text aesthetic rather than functional. In 1959, in the computer lab of the ‘Technische Hochschule’, Theo Lutz fed vocabulary taken from Franz Kafka’s Das Schloss into a Zuse Z 22, and wrote a program determining several rules of combination, and thus generated the first artificial, chance determined literary text.
