Unearthing Digital Tendencies in Post-War Texts in Print
Bronac Ferran
Summary
Bronac Ferran explores how post-war printed texts anticipate digital, binary and nonlinear modes of composition and reading. She traces the influence of information theory and early computing on experimental poetry, beginning with Max Bense’s 1965 account of “agentive aesthetics,” in which creative control shifts from the human author to a constellation of programmed, generative procedures. Drawing on Claude Shannon’s statistical methods and his own frequency analyses of literary works, Bense argues for computer-programmed artificial poetry and, by 1959, encourages students to use the Zuse 22 mainframe to produce algorithmic texts. Ferran highlights Theo Lutz’s stochastic text, generated from a lexicon and syntactical rules, alongside Helmut Heissenbüttel’s visually patterned “Vortex” poem, showing how both works make sequence, spacing and repetition meaningful in themselves and foreground how punctuation, intervals and visual arrangement become carriers of meaning. She also invokes Alan Turing’s insistence that the property of being digital matters more than being electronic, and Gregory Bateson’s definition of digital signals as discontinuous, reinforcing the idea that digitality is a notational rather than medium-specific quality. Through these examples, Ferran unearths a pre-digital field of human–machine language experimentation rooted in post-war print culture.
This AI summary was generated by kimi-k2.7-code (13th August 2026).