Lea Pao, “Max Bense, poet?”

In the post-war era’s rise of computational thinking, Max Bense (1910-1990) emerged as one of the most prolific German writers of theoretical and philosophical texts on technology, computer art, semiotics, and information aesthetics. Inspired by Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, George Birkhoff’s mathematical models, and Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s information theory, Bense developed both theoretical and practical approaches to literary texts as information processes and products of cybernetic systems.

Max Bense was also a poet, even as less attention has been paid to Bense’s own creative output—his poetic work and thinking. While his pioneering work in computer and computer-generated art has inspired a whole generation of concrete poets and early digital artists (Christoph Klütsch, Haroldo de Campos), his poetry has remained a side note, a “Neben-Werk,” to his philosophical writings (Friederike Roth). This talk examines the role of his poetic “side-work,” its strange and unexpected retreat into traditional forms, and the reason why Bense, the poet, has remained in the shadows of his own theoretical work.   

Lea Pao is an Assistant Professor of German Studies. Her current book (Towards an Archaeology of Forgotten Information Concepts: Klopstock, Meister, Egger, Kräftner) offers a vertical thinking about information and poetry not as parallel discourses, but as overlapping layers of human engagement. She is the co-translator of Peter Janich’s What is Information? (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), and the co-editor of Information: A Reader (Columbia University Press, 2021). At Stanford, she teaches both graduate seminar and undergraduate courses on poetry, most recently “German Poetry, Global Poetics” and “10 Poems That Will Change Your Life.”