Theo Lutz

Theo Lutz was born in 1932 in Germany. He studied mathematics, physics, and electronics in Stuttgart and Tübingen, where he became a student of philosopher Max Bense and was connected to the Stuttgart School of information aesthetics. In 1959 he joined Standard Elektrik Lorenz in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, later moving to IBM Germany, where he led product forecasting and technology assessment. Lutz pursued an academic career as professor of information technology at Esslingen University of Applied Sciences.

In 1959 Lutz programmed Stochastische Texte on a Zuse Z22 computer at the Technical University of Stuttgart, one of the first works of computer-generated literature. The system drew from a database of 16 nouns and 16 adjectives taken from Kafka’s The Castle, combined with pronouns, conjunctions, and logical operators, producing more than four million possible sentence combinations. The results were published in augenblick, a literary journal, with an explanation of the process, while a follow-up poem titled und kein engel ist schön appeared the next year in Ja und Nein, a youth magazine, under the pseudonym electronus without explanation, leading some readers to mistake it for a human poem. The surviving printouts show that Lutz corrected small errors by hand, adjusting for details the Zuse machine did not handle, such as mis-gendered forms and punctuation. Lutz showed how algorithmic rules could generate grammatically valid sentences without reference to individual consciousness or intention. He also explored how probability matrices might restrict the machine’s output to “meaningful” sentence pairs, anticipating later statistical approaches in artificial intelligence. In 1987 he published Zehn mal 2010, a set of theses forecasting the future of computing, where he predicted everyday communication with machines through natural language and reflected on their social impact.

Lutz’s Stochastische Texte is preserved at ZKM Karlsruhe and the German Literature Archive in Marbach and remains a reference point in electronic literature. He co-authored Programmierfibel with Volker Hauff, Keiner weiß, was Kybernetik ist with Rolf Lohberg, and contributed essays to volumes on Bense. For his contributions, Lutz received recognition including the JPT Förderpreis Computer Art in 1986 and a stipend from the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg in 1989. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at ZKM in Writing the History of the Future, where Stochastische Texte was restored and displayed as a landmark in digital literature. Lutz passed away in 2010.