The most radical of these new procedural approaches was visual or concrete poetry, in which words are transformed from literary signs into graphical signs. This opened a new field for aesthetic experimentation. In , Bense and Dohl wrote the manifesto for the literary component of the Stuttgart group.
Entitled "Zur Lage" , meaning "Toward an experimental condition or state of affairs", the essay articulates the following elements of concrete poetry in terms that emphasize typography and process: In this list, the material of concrete poetry, i. The elements of sound, meter, and graphic form are isolated and considered as independent parameters.
Instead of conventional lyric production, the isolated elements become the material for experimental stochastic and algorithmic processes. That same year, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Jasia Reichardt launched the exhibition Between Poetry and Painting , which was heavily influenced by the experiments in Stuttgart. It was here that Bense and Reichardt met for the first time, inspiring her to make "something with the computer. The information aesthetics initially developed by Max Bense and Abraham A.
Moles in the latter half of the s tried to bridge philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, social sciences, and art theory. The goal was to develop a theory that would allow one to measure the amount and quality of information in aesthetic objects, thus enabling an evaluation of art that goes beyond "art historian chatter". Information aesthetics investigated the numerical value of "the aesthetic object" itself.
Based on David Birkhoff 's mathematical theory of aesthetics , the theoretical mathematician Norbert Wiener 's Cybernetics: Bense's early thinking on aesthetics starts with a Hegelian view in which art is seen as a teleological epistemic process. By the S and s, his interests had shifted to Peirce's pragmatic semiotics, which views logic as a function of signs and symbols.
By understanding aesthetic objects as signs, Bense linked semiotics to Shannon's purely technical information theory, where he adapts the concepts of linguistic signs to the problem of signal loss in technological communication. As a link between the technical notion and the human notion of communication, Bense built on Wiener's cybernetic theory. Following Wiener's theory of feedback, whereby some proportion of the output signal of a system is passed fed back to the input, Bense devised a model for theorizing how the process of art production, consumption, and criticism is procedurally related in terms that suggest computation.
In this theoretical frame, Bense aimed to create rational aesthetics free from subjective speculation and grounded on a purely scientific base. As a keystone for his scientific aesthetics, Bense adopted Birkhoff's mathematical measurement of aesthetic values.
Robert Musil Essays und Reden Kritik & Prosa und Stucke Kleine Prosa Aphorismen
In the late S, Birkhoff had presented a simple formula to measure the aesthetic values of art: If you take low order O and low complexity C , for Bense the measurement M can still be high, but with Moles's modification it would be at a minimum. If both values C and O are high, Bense gets a comparatively low measurement M , while Moles gets a maximum. Both approaches serve a purpose, and both pose problems. Bense was focused on the relation of the two values, and couldn't explain why very low values for O and C would be considered high aesthetic values.
This fundamental problem was not discussed in detail in the Stuttgart school.
Robert Musil: "Attempts to Find Another Human Being": Isis and Osiris
As these structuralist approaches to sign systems emerged, Bense combined Shannon's information theory , especially his analysis of the English language, with Birkhoff's mathematical analysis of aesthetic measure and Noam Chomsky 's generative grammar an idea of a general grammar that is hardwired into human brains and serves as a base for all natural languages. He formed a theory that allowed for the analysis of an art object on a microaesthetic level by investigating the use of sign repertoire.
Having a repertoire and rules for combining the elements of that repertoire, Bense now had the tools to form a model for the macroaesthetic values of aesthetic objects. In art he saw a process that moves in the opposite direction of the typical physical process. While for Bense the physical world heads toward chaos entropy , the world of art heads toward order negentropy.
Both process and order are key terms in his aesthetic, and these concepts deliver the ontological basis for his scientific approach.
Max Bense tried to place the aesthetic value of aesthetic objects within a metaphysical framework of process ontology and semiotics. Their intersection is the basis of information. He inverted the physical process of entropy in the arts: I agree with your assessment of Musil's resistance to closure as resistance to finality of form, and "final solutions". He consitutionally, philosophically could not finish. I talk about this alot in my book. Deferral through endless proliferation of alternatives, metaphors, possibilities, which figures forth the active role of what Nietzsche calls the "creative subject" in constantly creating our shared reality and maintaining metaphoric transparency the awareness that all of our descriptions of reality are mind-made and provisional.
It is aesthetic existentialism. The next step after the iconoclastic orgy, to build again, see again, re-vision. The idea of the content of our own lives as being formal, the inverted world reminds me so much of Proust's reflections on the way that Albertine becomes for Marcel merely a specific example of a pattern, she becomes a formal image of an idea.
Is this artistic objectivity some sort of aberration? Are artists freaks of some sort? Is it inhuman to rise above the pain and horror of the specific what most people see as content to a formal ecstasy?
- Making Marriage Work?
- Shop by category?
- Erlanger Liste - Digitale Texte.
- Dedecius, Karl [WorldCat Identities].
Is this escapism or is it wisdom? I think Musil comments on this somewhere in his aphorism collection. And Proust says that one should be lenient about judging the private lives of artists. I like how I misremembered the title. The Birth and Death of Tragedy?
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What was I thinking of? I didn't even notice! What were you feeling, might be the real question. Because, by the way, do you think everything is really going to hell in a handbag? A very expensive and beautiful one, to be sure, but still? Even tragedy is dead, long live tragedy!