Abraham Moles — Information Theory and Esthetic Perception

1966

Artists: Abraham Moles · Year: 1966 · Medium: Theoretical book — Shannon information theory applied to aesthetic experience · Substrate: Published book; French original 1958, English translation by Joel E. Cohen (University of Illinois Press, 1966) · Place: Strasbourg, France · Institution: University of Strasbourg; later CNRS Abraham Moles's Information Theory and Esthetic Perception (French original 1958, English translation 1966) is the French theoretical companion to Max Bense's work at Stuttgart. Moles applied Shannon's information theory to aesthetic experience, arguing that a perceiver processes an artwork as information and that the artwork's aesthetic impact can be measured in information-theoretic terms — redundancy, originality, information density, and so on. Like Bense, Moles was not treating the framing as metaphor; he intended it as empirical. The book's practical influence on computer-art practice was substantial. It gave French-speaking computer artists and theorists a vocabulary for what they were doing. Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr, and other Paris-based practitioners worked within an intellectual context that Moles had helped to shape; the Paris computer-art community's self-understanding in the 1960s and 1970s was continuous with the Strasbourg information-aesthetics programme. Moles's scope extended beyond computer art. He wrote on mass media, on the sociology of design, on the aesthetics of kitsch, on cybernetic theory generally. His 1967 Sociodynamique de la culture and 1971 Le kitsch are distinct contributions to postwar French intellectual history. But his information-aesthetics work is the part of his corpus most directly relevant to this archive. His theoretical writings remain in print in French and are less widely available in English than they deserve to be. Lore Moles's Strasbourg circle included Frank Popper, the art historian whose subsequent writing on kinetic and electronic art (Art — Action and Participation, 1975) was heavily influenced by Moles's information-aesthetics. The Strasbourg-Paris connection was the main axis of French computer-art theorization, with Bense's Stuttgart school as its primary German counterpart. Moles was also an active radio and mass-communications theorist; his work on popular culture anticipated later media-studies concerns. Sources • Moles, Abraham — Information Theory and Esthetic Perception (English: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1966) • Moles, Abraham — Théorie de l'information et perception esthétique (French: Flammarion, 1958) • University of Strasbourg — Moles archive