Why Write Noise? Information Aesthetics and its Subversion in Max Bense, Miekal And and Others
Catalogue image of Miekal And’s Why Publish Noise? by The NewBridge Project, Newcastle upon Tyne; noise processed by Florian Cramer.
Why Write Noise? Information Aesthetics and its subversion in Max Bense, Miekal And and Others
This lecture delves into “noise,” tracing its evolution from Max Bense’s academic Information Aesthetics in the 1960s to Miekal And’s countercultural manifesto Why Publish Noise? and his 1990 book Polynoise (co-authored with Amendant Hardiker).
Both Bense and And seem to agree that aesthetic value relies on high-entropy unpredictability or the disruption of structural redundancy. However, they depart from opposite positions. Bense’s scientific rationalism was fiercely opposed by early Situationists such as Asger Jorn and Gruppe Spur, who weaponized his theories by staging a fake Bense lecture with a tape montage hoax. Conversely, And fused early 20th-century avant-garde poetry with 1990s post-Situationist and anarchist counterculture in his noise poetics, advocating noise as an antidote to cognitive assimilation, the production of “disinformation-objects” and the “collective bashing of the profit economy of information.”
Yet this subversive lineage is ambivalent. Direct genealogies exist from Gruppe SPUR’s disruption tactics to the contemporary German Neue Rechte (“New Right”), including Frank Böckelmann and Götz Kubitschek. Similarly, fringe actors in 1980s and 1990s U.S. noise counterculture prefigured the 2010s and 2020s “Alt-Right.” Additionally, 1990s anarchist visions for digital media — including some in Polynoise — can be interpreted as unintended and coopted prophecies of today’s techno-libertarian capitalism.
Since today’s generative AI is based on noise and redundancy, and since platforms monetize disinformation, this lecture asks: Can “writing noise” still be a critical poetics?
Speaker Biography
Florian Cramer is Professor in Artistic Research at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands.
His publications include Exe.cut(up)able statements: poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des selbstausführenden Texts (Wilhelm Fink, 2011); (with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Hito Steyerl and Clemens Apprich) Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press, 2018); and (with Simon Kentgens) Lumbung, Commons and Community Art (HumDrum Press, 2023).
Recent papers and essays include (with Elaine W. Ho) “A Near-Sighted Falling into Technology: Through the Looking Glass of Art Practice as Human Self-Experimentation, Accidents and Coincidence”; “Die Kaleidoskop-Begrenzung. Automatisierte Künste, aus ihren Sackgassen betrachtet” (2025); (with Clara Balaguer and Marc van Elburg) “Against the [Cozy] Prettyprinters: A Defense of Crappy Print” (2025); and (with Nienke Terpsma) “Grenzüberschreitung als gesundes Volksempfinden” (2026).
