Machine poetry

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.