sbenthall.net

Just so that I have no direction to go but down, I’m going to go ahead and do the most pretentious thing that it is possible for a human being to do. That is to “define” a kind of art. In doing so, I’m trying to explain some of the thinking that goes into the drawings I’ve been posting here, and inviting others to use this idea to inspire them to try similar things. I would be very interested in seeing any work that is inspired by these ideas, or talking to anyone with similar thoughts on the matter.

Recall that conceptual art is art that is a concept or idea. The execution is perfunctory, the artifact is secondary. (I’m alluding to Joseph Kosuth here)

Concepts are generally not visually appealing in themselves. Though I would maintain that conceptual art can greatly enhance a physical space, some people have criticized conceptual art for this reason. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that a lot of people don’t like conceptual art because it is ugly.

With the digitalization of art, we have the option to operate at a different, deeper layer. Art can be defined by its information content.

This is different from saying that art can be data. In fact, most of the drawings on this site are just data. They are rendered for you by your monitors.

But information is something else. The definition of ‘information’ is up for grabs, but I am using it in a sense that is abstracted from Claude Shannon. Information is, in this conception, the revelation of an unknown (probabilistic) event. The page is loaded, the pixels revealed–what are they? Here they are. Information.

Information is a choice between options. It is a selection among differences. When the variable is repeated, the information can itself present a series of differences. Heads Heads Tails Heads Tails Tails.

However, since perception is bounded by context and attention, information can be reflected at multiple levels of abstraction for the same data. So, for example, there is compositional difference in the amount of brightness contrast in one side of an image or another. There is difference in texture at the collision of two brushes. There is a difference in color. There is a representation of something. There is abstraction. There is the destabilization of a representation into an abstraction. All of these events are possible within a single (static) image. (Even more is possible with animation, of course; it adds a whole new dimension of events.)

Perhaps this is similar to the idea that a single document can contain several narratives, nested and interlinked.

The most famous kind of informational art is the fractal, which is special because the information available at various levels of analysis is self-similar. Fractals are pretty precisely because they contain less information than you might think just by looking at them, and in so doing express recursivity as an event in the possible arrangement of information.

But there are a lot of other options. Exploration of this space of options could be called ‘informational art’.

What do you think?