Digital Estetikk hos Max Bense og Inger Christensen

Abstract

Digital Aesthetics in Max Bense and Inger Christensen

This article examines the concept of digital poetry by the German philosopher and cybernetician Max Bense, and operationalizes it in a reading of the Danish novel Azorno (1967) by Inger Christensen. It suggests that Bense’s concept of digital poetry catches a part of the philosophical zeitgeist of the era. It expresses an idea of a doubled sense of reality – a technical reality – propelled by the mediatechnological condition of the early Information Age. This double sense of reality is traceable in Azorno, and the novel is thus read as a work of literature that both is a product of and a reflection upon the changing mediatechnological conditions in the postwar years.