Machine poetry

Editor Frank Wendler

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Machine Poetry is a clever title for an exhibition at Strauhof that presents artistic play with typewriters, computers and AI.

As we all know, the typewriter has gone out of fashion. I used it to write my first printed text, an article about Prince, whose music spun on the turntable while I chopped words into the machine. My first computer was a Schneider Joyce, green lettering on a black background, no joke! Later I worked with an Apple Macintosh, a computer with a handle, which I affectionately called a mouse cinema. And today I play around with AI and read up on the subject because I want to know where the journey can take me. Like me, many people were and are connected to these devices as tools. But for various artists, they are more than just machines that they work with.

In the Machine Poetry exhibition, Strauhof looks back at the poetic interplay between man, machine and text. The artistic use of the new technology began early on. Christian Morgenstern, for example, already used the poem "The Funnels" in an absolutely convincing typographical way at the beginning of the 20th century.

Through her narrowed shaft
white moonlight
flows quietly and serenely
onto her
forest path
and so on

He was followed by the Dadaists, who created random texts using words cut out of newspapers. And on their shoulders, the surrealists attempted to transform themselves into human writing machines with their "écriture automatique". In the 1950s, the first computers awakened the desire to experiment in a new generation of writers, and on the horizon was the quite frightening possibility that machines, rather than humans, could become the standard of creativity.

The exhibition outlines these artistic experiments and devotes special attention to two protagonists of typewriter art: the Swiss writer Reto Hänny and the German artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. And, of course, artificial intelligence (AI) as the latest technology finds advocates and apocalyptics in this spectrum. Perlentaucher, the digital culture magazine, currently lists 128 current books on the subject - but so far not a single one written exclusively by AI. But that may yet come.

In the second part of the exhibition, one woman and two men from the three German-speaking countries exemplify poetry with typewriters, computers and AI. The Austrian Marianne Fritz pushed the boundaries of legibility in her monumental work Naturgemäss. The Swiss text tinkerer Beat Gloor used the computer for language experiments with monosyllabic words. And the German Hannes Bajohr explains how he fed GPT-J and GPT-NeoX to write the novel "Berlin, Miami)" - which astounds with thoroughly original turns of phrase: "How long I've been a Nichtmehr. Every day I'm over earlier."

In mid-January 2024, Japanese writer Rie Kudan was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. In her acceptance speech, she said that around five per cent of the text was written directly by generative AI. But could an AI also write a complete novel? Much is craft. But for an AI, learning style is still tantamount to 'imitating style. As things stand today, it is difficult to imagine an AI developing an independent, unmistakable style. And from a writer's point of view, that's pretty comforting.