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LANGUAGE, INFORMATION, AND TECHNE
Peter Krapp (UC Irvine), From generative aesthetics to media studies: Max Bense and information theory
Thursday January 31, 2013 | 04:15 -06:00 PM | Building 200 Room 307

Information theory influenced the work of some of the foremost media theorists of the second half of the 20th century, ranging from Marshall McLuhan, Michel Serres and Max Bense to Vilem Flusser, Friedrich Kittler, and Katherine Hayles, to name but a few. As humanities scholars grounded in historical and conceptual inquiry, they integrate insights from the history of technology and the philosophy of science. Information is a complex term, from its etymological connotations of the formative (including education) to denoting something communicable across time and space (indicating that its value may depend on a particular time and space), and on to Shannon's quantitative definition. These aspects are retained to different degrees in the current use of the word in media studies; Mark Poster contrasts Marx's mode of production to a more contemporary mode of information, while Bense juxtaposes a classical, Archimedic world, understood in terms of expenditures of energy and labor, with a non-classical, Pascalian world of communication and information. A pivotal intervention along this trajectory is Bense's development of generative aesthetics, drawing on concepts of complexity and redundancy.