lutz_spiess_witt: latest computer poems
the installation „latest computer pomes“, developed for the exhibition „low tech art“ as part of < die digitale dusseldorf >, brings a long-ago event in the history of computer science into the present: in 1959, mathematics student theo lutz programmed an algorithm that used words from kafka’s „das schloss“ to produce stochastic poems on a zuse z22 at the university of stuttgart, the first computer poems ever. in 2017, germanist peter michael witt and mathematician frank spiess came up with the idea of reviving theo lutz’s algorithm and feeding it the automatically analysed twitter output of our present. tweets with the hashtag #theolutz and #digitale were automatically filtered, analysed for german nouns and adjectives using a language library at the university of antwerp, and new lutzian poems were built with this input.
on the opposite side to the projection, the first publication of lutz’s poem in max bense’s literary journal „augenblick. aesthetica, philosophica, polemica“ was shown in a light box.
info: peter michael witt met the late theo lutz in the 1980s as the father of his girlfriend at the time.
#computerart #theolutz #computerlyrics #stochastictext #digitalart #twitterart #computerkunst #twitterkunst #computerlyrik Theo Lutz Computerkunst Stochastische Texte Frank Spiess