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Mainframe Experimentalism MAINFRAME EXPERIMENTALISM Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts Edited by Hannah B Higgins and Douglas Kahn Q3 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London 4 INFORMATION AESTHETICS AND THE STUTTGART SCHOOL Christoph Kllitsch In the mid-1960s, mainframe computer art emerged from an adventurous en­ counter among a new information aesthetic, political ideologies, and technical possibilities. In Stuttgart, new computer technology invited speculation about the nature of art, beauty, and mechanical production. Here a new generation of artist-scientists believed the computer would enable them to break with the speculative and subjective approach to making and evaluating art. The main­ frame Denkmaschirzen1 (thinking machines) offered users the limited computing capacities of the time, forcing the computer artist to program carefully, to use the resources as economically as possible, and, through an extreme economy of means, to break down visual problems into small, elegantly designed pieces. Through an analysis of the early work of a few members of the Stuttgart school, the artistic range of early mainframe computer art, as well as its rigorous theoretical basis, will be discussed. The chronological beginning of the Stuttgart school falls somewhere between December 1964, when an article titled "Statistische Graphik" (Statistical graphic) by Georg Nees appeared in the journal Grundlagenstudien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft (GrKG; Fundamentals in cybernetics and humanities), and February 5, 1965, when the first computer art exhibition opened in Stuttgart.2 Max Bense had founded the Studiengalerie des Studium Generale (Study gallery of the general studies program) in 1958, and, by the time the gallery closed in 1978, Bense had presented ninety-one exhibitions there and borne witness to the rise and collapse of the Stuttgart schooP As one of the founders of information aesthetics, he had an influence throughout the first generation of computer art­ ists, in all their various forms: mathematicians, engineers, philosophers, artists, 65 66 CENTt=?S iNF=ORM,A.TiO['.) l\[STHETICS 67 poets, writers, and sculptors were among his pupils and disciples. Bense had In this list, the material of concrete poetry, i.e., language, is broken down into its studied mathematics, physics, geology, and philosophy at Bonn University.4 His atomic elements and investigated by the relation between signs and their sto­ book Konturen einer Geistesgeschichte da Mathematik: Die lVIathematik und chastic frequencies. The elements of sound, meter, and graphic form are isolated die Kunst (Contours of an intellectual history of mathematics [1949]) theorized and considered as independent parameters. Instead of conventional lyric pro­ a relationship between mathematics and art in terms of a relationship between duction, the isolated elements become the material for experimental stochastic order and chaos. In 1950, he came to Stuttgart, where he taught philosophy of and algorithmic processes. That same year, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts technology, science theory, and mathematical logic at Stuttgart University till in London, Jasia Reichardt launched the exhibition Between Poetry and Painting, 1976. Between 1954 and 1958, Bense followed a request by Max Bill to teach "in­ which was heavily influenced by the experiments in Stuttgart. It was here that formation" at the Ulm Hochschule fUr Gestaltung (Ulm School of Design). Bense and Reichardt met for the first time, inspiring her to make "something with During that time, Bense founded the magazine Augenblick, one of the most the computer." As a result, Reichardt curated the legendary exhibition Cybernetic important German literary magazines of the era. Shortly thereafter, litterateurs Serendipity in 1968 at the same institution? Helmut HeiBenbuttel (1955) and Reinhard Dohl (1959) came to Stuttgart. In 1960, in collaboration with his later partner, Elisabeth Walther, Bense started INFORMATION AESTHETICS another editorial project: a set of small books called edition rot with a reappear­ ing quote by Ernst Bloch on their back covers: "There are also red secrets in the The information aesthetics initially developed by Max Bense and Abraham A. world, actually, only reds."5 By the late 1950S, Max Bense had become increas­ Moles between 1956 and 1958 tried to bridge philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, ingly interested in the relation between algorithms (mathematics) and aesthet­ social sciences, and art theory.8 The goal was to develop a theory that would al­ ics (the arts). low one to measure the amount and quality of information in aesthetic objects, Beginning in the 1950S, literary groups such as the Vienna group, the Darm­ thus enabling an evaluation of art that goes beyond "art historian chatter." Infor­ stadt circle of visual poets, and the Graz circle of Austrian and German musi­ mation aesthetics investigated the numerical value of "the aesthetic object" itself. cians and writers emerged in rebellion against the normative political and cul­ Based on David Birkhoff's experiments on aesthetic measurements around 1928, tural climate of postwar Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. A new, procedurally the theoretical mathematician Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics: or, Control and Com­ experimental literature offered radically alternative means of producing written munication in the Animal and the Machine from 1948, Claude Shannon's infor­ words. Language was newly conceived of as an artistic material that could be mation theory from 1948, and Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory, Bense combined with new procedures ofliterary production. The most radical of these focused on physical concepts such as entropy, process, and co-reality, while new procedural approaches was visual or concrete poetry, in which words are Abraham Moles, similar to Daniel Berlyne, accentuated aspects of perception transformed from literary signs into graphical signs. This opened a new field for theory and psychology. aesthetic experimentation. In Stuttgart, the literary element of the group con­ Max Bense's early thinking on aesthetics starts with a Hegelian view in which sisted of the philosophers and writers Max Bense, Reinhard Dohl, Ludwig Harig, art is seen as a teleological epistemic processY By the 1950S and 1960s, his inter­ and Helmut HeiBenbuttel and the typographers Hansjorg Mayer and Klaus Bur­ ests had shifted to Peirce's pragmatic semiotics, which views logic as a function khardt. In 1964, Bense and Dohl wrote the manifesto for the literary component of signs and symbols. By understanding aesthetic objects as signs, Bense linked of the Stuttgart group. Entitled "Zur Lage," meaning "Toward an experimental semiotics to Shannon's purely technical information theory, where he adapts the condition or state of affairs," the essay articulates the following elements of con­ concepts of linguistic signs to the problem of signal loss in technological com­ crete poetry in terms that emphasize typography and process: munication. As a link between the technical notion and the human notion of communication, Bense built on Wiener's cybernetic theory. Following Wiener's Types-type arrangements-type pictures theory of feedback, whereby some proportion of the output signal of a system is Signs-graphic arrangements-font pictures passed (fed back) to the input, Bense devised a model for theorizing how the pro­ Serial and permutational realizations-metrical and acoustic poetry cess of art production, consumption, and criticism is procedurally related in Sound-sound arrangement-phonetic poetry terms that suggest computation. In this theoretical frame, Bense aimed to create Stochastic and topological poetry rational aesthetics free from subjective speculation and grounded on a purely Cybernetic and material poetry6 scientific base. 68 CENTERS 69 As a keystone for his scientific aesthetics, Bense adopted Birkhoff's mathe­ In Stuttgart, a generation of young scientists in the circle around Bense exam­ matical measurement of aesthetic values. In the late 1920S, Birkhoff had pre­ ined various aspects of information aesthetics. Rul Gunzenhiiuser, for example, sented a simple formula to measure the aesthetic values of art: M = 0 I C, where applied Shannon's information theory to Birkoff's concept of aesthetic measure, the aesthetic measure (M) is defined as the ratio of order (0) and complexity building up a theory of microaesthetics.19 Helmar Frank focused on percep­ (C). to This formula was adapted in very different ways. Whereas Bense adhered to tion. 20 He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under Abraham Moles in Paris before he the original equation, M = 0 I C, Moles modified the formula into M = 0 x C, came to Stuttgart. Georg Nees wrote his first aesthetical programs in 1964, and with drastic implications. If you take low order (0) and low complexity (C), for finished his Ph.D. on generative aesthetics under Max Bense in 1968, applying his Bense the measurement (M) can still be high, but with Moles's modification it aesthetic explicitly to computer art.21 Outside of the Stuttgart school, Umberto would be at a minimum. If both values C and 0 are high, Bense gets a compara­ Eco offered his own approach to information aesthetics in The Open Work. 22 It is tively low measurement (M), while Moles gets a maximum. Both approaches within this greater context of computation, philosophy, and an emerging theory serve a purpose, and both pose problems. Bense was focused on the relation of of information aesthetics that Bense's arrival
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