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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00725
- Thesis Title
- From Artworks to Artworlds: Information Efflorescence and Complex Systems Aesthetics
- Author
- Jason Hoelscher
- E-mail
- jason.hoelscher AT gmail.com
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- PhD: Aesthetics and Art Theory
- Year
- 2018
- Number of Pages
- 445
- University
- Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
- Thesis Supervisor
- Brian Massumi
- Supervisor e-mail
- massumib AT gmail.com
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- Visual Arts / Art Theory
- Copyright Ownership
- Jason Hoelscher
- Languages Familiar to Author
- Hoelscher
- URL where full thesis can be found
- www.lulu.com/shop/www.lulu.com/shop/jason-hoelscher/dissertation-draft-31-feedback-copy/paperback/product-23726367.html
- Keywords
- art, minimalism, information theory, complexity, complex adaptive systems, chaos, emergence, epiphenomena, relative entropy, Danto, Susanne Langer, Frank Stella, Adrian Piper, Drop City, Stuart Kauffman, Gilbert Simondon, Souriau, Uexkull, adjacent possib
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- The contemporary role of information, as a driver and shaper of our technosocial era, is predicated increasingly on information’s usefulness for purging indeterminacy, streamlining situations, and circumscribing potentials. Are there alternate information modes that operate counter to this, predicated less on quantification, standardization and reification than on relational emergence and qualitative potentiation? In other words, whereas regulative information resolves indeterminacy and constrains difference, what about generative information that instead sustains indeterminacy and differentiation?
As I show here, just such open and indeterminate information is what we otherwise call art. Specifically, I argue that information in its aesthetic mode is a différance engine that resists equilibrial settling into answer and fact, and instead unfinalizably produces, rather than resolves, differentiation and indefinition. By not only considering art in terms of information but also information in terms of art, I describe here how both are surface effects of the same deep operations of difference and disparity. Put simply, information is to art as difference is to differencing, and as being is to becoming.
Defining art as a reciprocally differential feedback relation between an object of focus and its context, I articulate the above ideas by exploring the 1960s emergence of (and subsequent dissolution of) the artwork as object, which marked a shift from artworks that represent worlds to artworks situated as elements of the world. As I show, this ingression introduced complex perturbations into art’s traditional processes of actualization, catalyzing an efflorescence of such increasingly atmospheric and ambient information modes as entropic fields, theatrical space, artworld Umwelten, associated milieus, and adjacent possibility transspaces. By exploring how these aesthetic information processes operate, my goal is to reveal not only the differential and non-deterministic processes that underlie discourse formation and artistic progress, but also how information operates as an open and expansive generator of contexts and potentials, rather than as merely a regulator of situations and outcomes.