Neoavantgarde and Cybernetics: Oswald Wiener’s ’improvement of central europe’

Book presentation of the translation and commentary by Nicola Cipani, NYU The translator and commentary author in conversation with Thomas Eder, University of Vienna Nicola Lucchi, CIMA - Center for Italian Modern Art Despite its undisputed place in the canon of the avant-garde, Oswald Wiener’s improvement of central europe (die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman) has long remained a riddle in need of interpretation. At the time of its publication in the ‘60s — among puzzled, even shocked, reactions — Wiener’s novel gained immediate recognition as epoch-defining work. Presented as a “novel”, the book is in fact a conglomerate of writings — from philosophical fragments to montage, from scientific metafiction to theatrical farce, from pseudo-diary to automatic invention — aimed at a radical critique of society. The author of this furious exercise was a young writer who called himself a “student of a new anarchy”, a former enfant terrible of the experimental poetry circle known as the “V