Contemporary critical discussions around issues in aesthetics that have emerged with newer technologies – such as CGI, AI art, and algorithmic techniques for art evaluation – usually take place without being historically informed by past relevant theories and debates. This course aims to fill some of these gaps by providing an exploratory historical survey of several approaches to ‘information aesthetics.’ ‘Information’ in this sense refers to the Mathematical Theory of Communication developed by Claude Shannon in 1948, which made possible and continues to govern information technologies. Since its emergence there have been a number of attempts to apply it to problems in philosophical aesthetics and in the arts quite generally. The first notable application occurred in the 1950s and ‘60s in Germany and France with the works of Max Bense and Abraham Moles. They sought to use information theory to develop a rational and objective aesthetics by considering the statistical measure of information as a mathematical measure of aesthetic value. Although it influenced many artists and critics at the time, it had little lasting influence and is largely forgotten today. Also in the 1950s and ‘60s, French philosophers Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon developed inventive applications of the notion of information to many philosophical problems. While they were more interested in metaphysical issues, they both made forays into the realm of aesthetics. These contributions were mostly unnoticed at the time, but are now being rediscovered. More recently, theorists such as Jason A. Hoelscher and Cecile Malaspina have approached information aesthetics from a different angle, focusing on the indeterminacy in an information system as what best expresses the unpredictability and surprise of uncompromisingly original artworks. While the course will focus on the historical substance of the philosophical theories, consideration will be given to how information aesthetics may import for the arts that have developed along with information technologies.
Course Schedule
Lecture 1: Introduction to ‘Information,’ ‘Aesthetics,’ and ‘Information Aesthetics’
This lecture will introduce some basic concepts of Claude Shannon’s Information Theory (also known as the Mathematical Theory of Communication, or MTC), such as entropy as the probabilistic measure of amount of information. It will also introduce some basic ideas in philosophical aesthetics, emphasising its problematic nature in the history of philosophy, especially in relation to epistemology (theory of knowledge). This will provide a grounding for understanding what is at stake in informational theories of aesthetics. This lecture will also introduce the basic assumptions and aims of the information aesthetics of Bense and Moles.
Reading
- Frieder Nake, “Information Aesthetics: An Heroic Experiment,” Journal of Mathematics and the Arts 6.2 (2012): 65-75.
Lecture 2: Generative Aesthetics: Max Bense and the Stuttgart School
This lecture will provide an introductory overview of the first emergence of information aesthetics, with the German philosopher Max Bense (1910-1990) and his followers – such as Helmar Frank (1933-2013) and Rul Gunzenhäuser (1933-2018) – collectively known as the Stuttgart School. Bense identified two phases of the artwork, its generation by the artist (hence a focus on the ‘generative’ aspect of aesthetics), and secondly its appreciation by the audience or critic. Bense incorporated semiotics with information theory, and focused on artworks (such as images and texts) as arrangements of elementary signs in a complex ‘supersign’ with a calculable information measure.
Reading
- Max Bense, “The Projects of Generative Aesthetics,” in Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas, J. Reichardt, ed., Studio Vista, London, 1971, pp. 57-60.
Lecture 3: Information Aesthetics: Abraham Moles
The third lecture will introduce the second founder of information aesthetics, French engineer and philosopher Abraham A. Moles (1920-1992). Moles proposed to understand aesthetic information as a counterpart to semantic information: while semantic (meaningful) information concerns the content of the message, the aesthetic information concerns how the message appears. While semantic information is indifferent to its supports, aesthetic information is specific to them, and untranslatable into different means of appearing. Similarly, Moles distinguished information value (relevant to the aesthetic judgement of a message) from the objective information measure. Yet he proposed a relation between them: when information measure is very low (redundancy) or very high (unpredictability), the value of the work is likely to be judged as low. A high-value work is likely to be somewhere in between, neither banal (informationally redundant) nor chaotic (informationally unpredictable).
Reading
- Excerpts from Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception (U of Illinois Press, 1968 [1958]).
Lecture 4: Aesthetics and French Philosophy of Information: Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon
Lecture four will cover two French philosophers whose works were long obscure, but are now becoming known as useful resources for contemporary issues surrounding information technologies. Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987) and Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) both developed early responses and creative extensions of information theory via critical engagements with cybernetics. Each proposed original ways of understanding information which, they believed, better fulfilled the aims of cybernetics and better responded to philosophical requirements. For Ruyer, an adequate theory of information must combine the psychological and physical meanings of the term, which metaphysically requires appeal to a ‘trans-spatial’ realm beyond physical space-time. For Simondon, information should be generalised as ‘the formula for individuation’ in order to account for all processes of ontogenesis, that is, how things become what they are. Both philosophers extended they investigations of information and technology to questions of aesthetics. Ruyer considered what the idea of the ‘artist’s message’ might be after information theory, and Simondon sought to transform culture to overcome the alienating relation we often have to technology, with the idea of information and a ‘techno-aesthetics.’
Reading
- Raymond Ruyer, “Quasi-information, Psychologism, and Culturalism,” trans. Ashley Woodward (to be supplied)
- Gilbert Simondon, “On Techno-Aesthetics,” trans. Arne De Boever Parrhesia 14 (2012): 1-8.
Lecture 5: Recent Aesthetics of Information: Jason A. Hoelscher and Cecile Malaspina
The final lecture will concern some much more recent work which applies information theory to issues in aesthetics, and does so in a way at odds with the aims of the original information aesthetics of Bense and Moles. While the earlier schools of information aesthetics were concerned to place aesthetics on a more securely objective and scientific footing, these recent thinkers attempt instead to show how the traditional ‘humanistic’ concerns of the arts – with meaning as surprise and unpredictability – can be used to reconceive information theory for aesthetics. Jason A. Hoelscher proposes that art may be understood as information in a mode of indeterminacy, as maintaining a state ‘in formation’ without final resolution. Art is more concerned with proposing questions and maintaining uncertainty than with informational messages conceived as answers. Cecile Malaspina underlines this indeterminacy in information theory in a way which has implications for aesthetics by focusing on noise. In information theory, noise is the name for the unwanted distortions (as produced for example by electrical interference) in a message. Yet Malaspina argues that it may also be understood as having a morphogenetic value; that is, being able to function as the source of the formation and transformation of forms.
Reading
- Excerpts from Jason A. Hoelscher, Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics (Duke UP, 2021)
- Excerpts from Cecile Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018).