Information Aesthetics
The first 130 pages containing journal “bit international” Max Bense, a close friend of concrete art artist Max Bill and Abraham Moles presented their work on the “information aesthetics”. Bense and Moles tried – in different ways – to offer a method to determine the value of art on a mathematical, scientific, and empirical bases. Referring to the theories of David Birkhoffabout mathematical aesthetics and Claude Shannon’s Information theory, art was considered to get it purely aesthetical value from the relation between order and complexity respectively information and redundancy. Combined with Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetic Theory the process of art criticism should not further relay on subjective opinions, but follow rational scientific criteria. This theoretical framework (Bense started his Aesthetica in 1954) challenged the ‘Stuttgart School of computer art’ not only to consider information aesthetics as an art critics tool, but as a method to generate art with help by a computer (via Londonvisualresearch)