Oswald Wiener actually pursued a clear goal throughout his life: to provide “the first debatable sketches of a complete solution to all world problems”. So it is in the description of his bio-adapter, a “happiness suit” with which he wanted to create a perfect balance between the “insufficient cosmos and the unsatisfied people”. The seekers of salvation in the pre-digital age took from 1960 Wiener’s book “The Improvement of Central Europe. Roman” , a literary experiment for all cases and solutions.
Wiener, an instigator of intellectual otherness
By the time he published this guide to unorthodox reflection, Oswald Wiener was already through his first scandalous times. As a member of the famous “Wiener Gruppe” (named after the city, not after Oswald), he established his reputation for being involved in everything that the Austrian capital had to offer artistically after the war – and for its reputation as the cradle of the aesthetic extremists kept alive. Together with Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer and Gerhard Rühm, he produced himself as a vaudeville magician of a neo-Dada language mania with a lot of prepotency and jazz. Later he cooperated with the sex, slime and body provocateurs Otto Muehl and Günter Brus, or instigated “art and revolution” in the student movement in 1968, which after a famous “university piggy” led to police persecution, which he escaped from the republic withdrawn.
As a legendary bar owner in the walled city of Berlin, he continued his restless career as an instigator of intellectual otherness – and at the age of 50 he was still studying mathematics. In general, you will hardly find a manic person of the 20th century who used his lifetime as diversely as the Viennese Viennese. He made himself known as a weird prophet of artificial intelligence, wrote another “diatribe” in 1990 as Evo Präkogler, entitled: “Not again …! A file found on a floppy disk”. As an art professor in Düsseldorf from 1992 and 2004, he passed on his broadband knowledge, networked with humor, to the boys. And he produced huge bundles of materials, from writings on epistemology to LSD experiments, cooking recipes and handwritten menus, piling up world knowledge.
But please always with grumpy sarcasm against the “healthy and heroic ideal of a homo sapiens ruling the cosmos”, which he pointedly made the just punishment of ridicule. Now the great universal mocker with scholarly status has died of pneumonia in Vienna at the age of 86. That would probably not have happened with the bio-adapter. But who wants to live forever as a “servo-narcissist”? Oswald Wiener certainly not.