Mourning the poet – head of the “Viennese group” Oswald Wiener is dead

“Art is propaganda for reality and is therefore forbidden!” Proclaimed Oswald Wiener in his novel “The Improvement of Central Europe”. He himself liked to play with art, reality and artificiality. The poet, epistemologist and cybernetic pioneer of artificial intelligence died on Thursday at the age of 86. His daughter Sarah Wiener confirmed this to the APA.

Oswald Wiener was not only regarded as the theoretical head of the “Wiener Gruppe”, but also as a formative literary member alongside Friedrich Achleitner, Gerhard Rühm, Konrad Bayer and HC Artmann. The FAZ once described his novel “die bettererung von mitteleuropa” (1969) as “one of the most disturbing documents in the German language.” “Wiener Gruppe” Oswald Wiener was born on October 5, 1935 in Vienna and studied law and music , African languages ​​and math. The radical aesthetic approach of the “Wiener Gruppe”, which built a bridge between anarchy and philosophy, art and literature with collages and montages, language experiments and literary cabaret, caused a sensation. In 1959 Wiener destroyed his entire literary work and in the following years worked as a computer expert at the Vienna Olivetti branch. In 1968 he was involved in the university campaign “Art and Revolution”, which caused a scandal and finally brought him to Berlin before a six-month prison sentence let escape. There he opened the restaurant “Exil” and took a distance learning course in mathematics and computer science at the Vienna University of Technology. From this point on it became his principle to transfer scientific and cybernetic approaches to literature and philosophy. Occupation with artificial intelligence and the fundamentals of mathematics, the fascination with the working methods of machines therefore also dominated Wiener’s literary work, for which he helped was awarded the Great Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1989.Mixed Limits In his second novel, “Not already again …!”, published in 1990 under the pseudonym Evo Präkogler, the boundaries between human and artificial existence were mixed up. His works, from the “literary essays” to his publications on the Turing tests for artificially intelligent systems, contributed independent approaches to all the disciplines they touch – literature, artificial intelligence, cybernetics. The honorary doctorate from the University of Klagenfurt (1995 ), which was awarded not only the State Prize for Literature but also the City of Vienna Literature Prize (1987), the Grillparzer Prize of the “Anonymous Actionists” (1993) and the “Manuscripts” Prize of the Province of Styria (2006) from 1992 to 2004 professor of aesthetics at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. His daughter with the visual artist Lore Heuermann, the EU politician, cook and author Sarah Wiener, grew up with her mother in Vienna.
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