Literary Dimensions Seminar
Dabney Hall 110 (Treasure Room)
"The Birth of Poetry From the Spirit of the Machine": Automatic Writing in the 1960s
Tobias Wilke,
Assistant Professor of German,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
In the 1960s, German information theorist and aesthetician Max Bense initiated some of the earliest experiments with computer-generated text production, seeking to establish a new form of literary writing that he described as "the birth of poetry from the spirit of the machine." My talk will discuss the historical contexts, theoretical foundations, and aesthetic implications of these pioneering endeavors through the lens of one example, Bense's radio play "The Monologue of Terry Jo" (1968), in order to consider their significance vis-à-vis more recent advances in the domain of artificial text generation.
Registration link: https://forms.gle/dPm3R5RBCqWmhj4V6
For more information, please contact Joanna Poon by phone at 626-395-1724 or by email at jpoon@caltech.edu.
Event Series
Literary Dimensions Seminar Series