Talk: Unearthing Digital Tendencies in Post-War Texts in Print
Bronač Ferran
17th April 2024, 19:00
BCS Moorgate, London
Bronac Ferran explores digital tendencies in post-war printed poetry, tracing connections between information theory, concrete poetry and experimental typography. Focusing on Max Bense, Theo Lutz and Hansjörg Mayer, she examines how rules, randomness and material printing processes anticipate computational practices, revealing histories of digital culture beyond the use of computers.
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Bronac Ferran traces digital, binary and nonlinear tendencies in postwar printed poetry, arguing that digital processes do not depend on electronic computers. She connects information theory, statistical approaches to language and concrete poetry through Max Bense’s writing and the Stuttgart experimental milieu. Claude Shannon’s analysis of textual probabilities informs approaches that treat words and signs as measurable elements rather than vehicles of expressive meaning. Theo Lutz’s computer-generated stochastic texts sit alongside manually produced experiments, revealing shared concerns with rules, sequence, repetition and randomness. Ferran centres Hansjörg Mayer’s typography, examining how letterpress, hot metal, offset and photocomposition become active materials within poetic production. Overprinted rose texts accumulate until semantic references dissolve into dense visual fields, while other works fragment letters, redistribute space or combine ordered systems with chance. These processes make time, memory and transformation perceptible through successive printed states. Collaborations and publications link Mayer with Brazilian concrete poets, Frieder Nake, Edwin Morgan and other practitioners across literary and computational boundaries. Perforated paper works extend his attention to discrete signs and material absence. Discussion considers the alphabet as a system, the artist’s interaction with printing machinery, and contemporary renewed interest in concrete poetry, distinguishing materially resistant poetic emergence from automated text.
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About the Event
Bronac Ferran traces the pre-history of digital poetics in post-war European experimental print culture, arguing that algorithmic, generative and nonlinear tendencies emerge in printed texts before their electronic realisation. She opens with Max Bense's 1965 theory of "agentive aesthetics" and his probabilistic, statistical readings of James Joyce's Ulysses, which anticipate algorithmic literary criticism. Ferran highlights Theo Lutz's 1959 stochastic text as an early computational experiment, while stressing that comparable serial, depersonalised and rule-based structures also appear in non-computational works, such as Helmut Heißenbüttel's Votex. Turning to concrete poetry, she examines how Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos and others embrace digital codification, non-verbal communication and the word-as-object. Central to her account is the typographer, printer and poet Hansjörg Mayer, whose collaborations with Bense and whose own "Typoaktionen" translate algorithmic logic into hot-metal letterpress, overprinting and fragmented typography. Ferran reads these materially saturated prints—such as Rosen Schiff Plätz—as proto-generative media that make time, process and memory visible on the page. She concludes by linking this overlooked lineage to contemporary practices including NFT poetry and AI-generated text, suggesting that post-war print already encoded many of the conceptual operations now associated with digital media.
About the Speaker
Bronač Ferran
