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- Lien, Jakob, 1984-
(författare)
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Maskintankar : Sammankopplingar av människan och det digitala i svensk litteratur 1965–1980
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Machine Thoughts explores how Swedish literature approached, explored, experimented with, and portrayed the post-war digital transformation. The period from 1965 to 1980 was characterized by accelerating technological development. The digital transitioned from being a matter for a few technically experts to increasingly permeating the entire society. In parallel with the introduction of digital media, and strongly influenced by each other, cybernetics and its elusive concept of information were introduced, further contributed to transforming the understanding of ourselves by challenging traditional notions of the body, identity, and subjectivity. Through analyses of science fiction and experimental prose, as well as more traditional novels and visually and linguistically exploratory poetry, the dissertation demonstrate how literature both shaped and was shaped by these circumstances. Through aesthetically explorative and playful forms, but also through more realistic expressions, literature posed questions about humans and machines, language and code, and the natural and the artificial. The study shows that there was a technically and aesthetically conscious way of relating to questions about the digital among institutions and authors long before more contemporary notions of digital literature, written for and read on screens, had been established. From media-ecological and media-archaeological perspectives, the dissertation sketches a history that points towards and puts our contemporary situation in perspective, showing how ideas related to the digital have been present for a long time and continue to inform and influence today’s literary and cultural discourses.In the first chapter of the dissertation, questions of language, code, and the changing conditions of communication are addressed by discussing how early experiments with algorithmic poetry reshaped and expanded the forms of literary writing. The second chapter examines the relationship between, and potential dissolution of, human subjects and technical objects, and between the natural and the artificial, considering the parallel emergence of cybernetics with digital technology. The third chapter investigates the hardware and infrastructure of the digital with a focus on the (changing) material conditions that underpinned the media development during the period 1965–1980. In a concluding chapter, the analytical points of the dissertation are summarized by turning to some contemporary literary and artistic examples that, in various ways, thematize or utilize AI in their works.
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