Description
Book SynopsisIn
Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the works of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork
Trade Review“Masterfully intertwining aesthetics, information theory, and entropy concepts, Jason A. Hoelscher offers an insightful account of the accelerated transformations of art practices in the 1960s.
Art as Information Ecology will open new pathways toward a better understanding of the complexities of periodizing contemporary art at a time when artworlds are in more intense communication with other systems. This ambitious book is bound to create ripple effects.” -- Cristina Albu, author of * Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art *
“In
Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher digs deep, looking into contemporary artworks in very different ways than ever before: from the premise that art can be a foundation of information that is like a multilayered cake, impossible to finish. I applaud Hoelscher for his in-depth, intense, and focused look into how art is a base for information systems that carry beyond the work themselves.” -- Sharon Louden, artist, educator advocate for artists, and editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books
“If the task of humanists presently is to make bridges with STEM, [
Art as Information Ecology] is a worthwhile effort in that direction. . . . For too long scholars have theorized about Western art in terms of the evolution from the static and remote icon; Hoelscher proposes to create a discourse that places art in the midst of contemporary intellectualism and to acknowledge how context, ever-changing, partly constitutes the work of art. Recommended.” -- P. Emison * Choice *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Art is Fuzzy Information 1
1. Art and Differential Objecthood 17
2. Aesthetic Entropy Machines 51
3. Butterfly Effects in Information Space 84
4. Information Efflorescence and the Aesthetic Singularity 119
5. Aesthetic Amplification and Adjacent Possibility 150
6. Complex Unities and Complex Boundaries 186
Conclusion. Information Entanglement and the Post-Evental Artworld 220
Notes 235
Bibliography 253
Index 267
