Unearthing Digital Tendencies in Post-War Texts in Print
Bronac Ferran

Summary

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.

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