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Art in the Time of the Artificial In February 1965when the first exhibit of computer art opened at the study gallery at the University of Stuttgart, Germany,showing a small selection of plotter drawings by Georg Nees 111,uneasy feelings emerged among the audience. Was this supposed to be art, if it was true that a computer had produced the works?To what extent was the computer the creator?To a considerable degree, the audience consisted of artistsfrom the Stuttgart area. Max Bense, the philosopher who had arranged the show [21, felt obliged to cool down the disturbance by stressinga distinguishing line between art as a purely human activityand art produced by computer. The latter he called artificialart (kiinstliche Kunst);thus, he coined a new concept. It is obviouslyunnecessaryto stress the fact that art is human-made, i.e. artificial.The word “art”itself carries this connotation. When Bense used the combination of art as a purely human activityand art produced by computer, he implied that there was a very real possibilityof having something like an artificialityof a second order. Supposedly,he was implicitlyreferring to artificialintelligence. Now, art has always been artificial,and it is ridiculous to assume anything different. Nowhere in nature do we encounter works of art, and it is only after art had become an important facet of human culture that we discoveredaesthetics in nature. We discover it by projection and interpretation only.And yet, compared to art created by the machine, traditional art appears to be natural. In this view, we take what we do without the help of a machine as natural, thus opening up a domain of artificialityfor the machine. Artificial art then becomes a synonym for machine art, i.e. art that is created through a process of the partial delegation of human activitiesto a machine. There is nothing terribly shocking about artists delegating some of their activitiesto someone else, even if delegated to a mechanical or electronic machine. Indeed, many artists have been clever managers in distributing labor to their employees.When software takes the place of the artist, or of his or her helpers, however, the question of who or what is the creator showsup: the artificiality of art. Bense very much liked the idea of generatingaesthetic objectswith the aid of computers because this could prove the point of informationaesthetics.Informationaestheticswas the heroic attempt by Bense and AbrahamA. Moles [3] to use Shannon’sand Weaver’s concept of information [4] as the guiding principle for an analysis of aesthetic processes,both analyticand generative.Although some excitinginsight into the nature of aesthetic processeswas gained this way, the attempt failed miserably. Nothing really remains today of their theory that would arouse any interest for other than historicalreasons. The failure of information aestheticsis due to its most fascinatingstarting point: the radical idea of an aestheticsof the object.All subjectivismwas to be banned from aesthetics: the focuswas to be on measure rather than valuejudgment, number rather than feeling, mathematics rather than psychology .An aestheticsof the object was supposed to produce methods of measuring the object such that a quantitativefeature vector would replace the aesthetic object in any matter of valuejudgment. Information aestheticsfailed when it became clear that information was no objective measure, but rather a subjective construct. The constructivistnotion of information as an emerging quality when systemsadapt to their environment turned information aesthetics into an extreme case of European scientificimperialism. But one concept remains that was central to information aesthetics: the concept of the aesthetic object as a sign, i.e. as a semiotic entity. This great assumption has gained tremendously in importance . Information aestheticswas turned into a semiotic aesthetics, borrowing the term and concept of “sign”from Charles S. Peirce, the well-known American philosopher [5]. Bense was one of the very first in Europe to understand the great importance of Peirce’swork for any communicative processes-and art is a process of communication. parts of aesthetics to informatics,which, in my opinion, turns out to be a technical semiotics or Asemioticallygrounded aesthetics not only opens the discourse of postmodernism, it also links 01998ISAST LEONARD0,Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 163-164,1998 163 semiotic engineering. The concept of sign is central to informatics...

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