Max Bense as a Visionary: from Entropy to the Dialectics of Programmed Images

In 1960 in Stuttgart, Max Bense published the book Programming the Beautiful [Programmierung des Sch{ö}nen]. Bense looks in cybernetics for scientific concepts and instigates the thought of programming in the field of literature. His information aesthetics influences a whole generation of scientists and artists - including the Stuttgart Circle, which takes hold of the new aesthetics to carry out the first programmed artistic images. Is Max Bense a visionary? How is he revolutionizing the world of images? The article discusses the cybernetics that inspired Bense: a science of probability that contrasts with the principles of Newtonian physics. Moreover, in the sixties, Max Bense, together with Elisabeth Walther, launched the experimental magazine Rot, which devoted its pages to the concrete poetry and the first computer-generated images of Georg Nees. As Frieder Nake defends through his pioneering work and theory, these images oppose the visible and the computable. This dialectic opens to a critical thinking on the algorithmic image in art and science.