David Oswald Max Bense and the Information Aesthetics

Bense teaching at the HfG, around 1956. Photo: Hans G. Conrad

When Max Bense ended his engagement at the HfG Ulm in 1958, he described his past work with the beautiful metaphor that he had "pumped intellectual substance into the school for four years".1 Of course, Bense was not the only intellectual "pump" at the HfG – the list of lecturers, guest lecturers and guest speakers seems to includes almost all of the great minds of the time. However, Bense's influence on the school's intellectual climate in the early years of the HfG should not be underestimated – even beyond the Information department. As part of the "cultural integration" programme, Bense taught students from all departments. In contrast to the students in the Information Department, they often did not have the Abitur [German higher education entrance qualification, comparable to British A-levels and US high school diploma] and had to catch up on their lack of general education, which was due to the war years. Bense offered a broad range of general philosophy, logic, philosophy of technology and art, aesthetics and philosophy of science.2 Bense had been involved in setting up a "Workers' and Farmers' University" in the city of Jena in the nascent GDR [German Democratic Republic, the then communist part of Germany] before settling in Stuttgart after some detours. He therefore had experience in dealing with students without Abitur [A-Levels] and the corresponding educational gaps.3 Nevertheless, some of the HfG students obviously found Bense's lectures too demanding, or lacked an increased motivation for intellectual work – this is hinted at in some of the previously published reviews of alumni of other HfG departments. The subjects that Bense was most concerned with from the mid-1950s onwards, mathematics-orientated information theory and information aesthetics, must have had a particularly hard time.

Even though Max Bense dealt with cybernetics in the early 1950s and increasingly with semiotics from the 1960s onwards, the term with which he is still most frequently associated today is "information aesthetics". At the same time, "information aesthetics" is also the term that is misunderstood most frequently. Even if book titles such as "The Programming of Beauty" 4 suggest it, Bense's information aesthetics is by no means about the calculation of beauty. Information aesthetics is neither a theory of proportion nor a theory of form. And quite apart from the question of whether a mathematical theory of proportion and form is even possible or desirable, information aesthetics has attracted little interest in product design and visual communication because it is of little use to the design process. Information aesthetics is mathematically and numerically orientated in such a way that classic questions of design, such as processes of use or aesthetic qualities, simply have counterpart in it.

Designers of a younger generation also run the risk of mistaking information aesthetics for sober information design – a design "style". Even if today's information design has some content-related and formal roots in Ulm and Swiss typography: The domain and aim of information aesthetics is by no means a correct presentation of data that serves to understand information. It is therefore not an opponent of advertising and persuasive methods – even if the Ulm context suggests this.

 

From Birkhoff via Shannon to Bense's information aesthetics

Bense's desire to calculate an aesthetic measure stands in the tradition of the mathematician Georg David Birkhoff, who first presented a mathematical formula for this purpose in 1928. The two parameters that Birkhoff uses in this formula are well known to the designer: Order and complexity. In classical modern design theory, simplicity and order are positively valued, while disorder and often also complexity are negatively valued. He forms a fraction. His aesthetic measure is order divided by complexity: M = O / C. A high degree of order therefore leads to a high aesthetic measure, while high complexity diminishes the aesthetic measure. The design premise of the early Bauhaus was obviously inscribed in this formula, with its worship of basic geometric forms and "pure" primary colours that appears quite esoteric today.5

Birkhoff's formula thus contains an implicit design-related judgement. In this context, Frieder Nake, who worked with Bense on "computer art" in Stuttgart at the end of the 1960s, has repeatedly pointed out that a strict distinction should be made between a measure and a value. A measure is obtained by measuring – that's why it's called a measure. A value, on the other hand, is created through judgement, i.e. evaluation.6 Both are mixed in Birkhoff's formula. The construction of the formula suggests that a high measure also corresponds to a high aesthetic value. The fact that Birkhoff chooses the form of a mathematical formula at all also implies that order and complexity can be expressed in numbers, i.e. measured and quantified. This is what he subsequently does. He develops measurement and calculation methods for the degree of order and complexity of polygons, nets and vases,7 and later also of music and poems.8 However, the way in which he does this is so questionable that Frieder Nake describes the method, and subsequently also the results, as "incredible nonsense" 9 In the formula for calculating the aesthetic measure of a polygon, for example, there are plausible measurement variables such as symmetry and balance (albeit without empirical evidence). However, there is also a variable called "friendliness" – of a polygon. The more complex the objects become, the more grotesque the attempts at measurement seem: Birkhoff determines the order of poems with a crude calculation in which alliterations, consonants, rhymes and "musical sounds" are added together and "excess" alliterations and consonants are subtracted from them. Poetry could hardly be judged more mechanically and superficially. In contrast, the information-theoretical version of the aesthetic measure, which Bense subsequently develops, relies on purely numerical statistics and thus avoids the confusion of measurement and evaluation – even though "Bense does not often and sharply enough point out that a higher information aesthetic measure does not mean that something is more aesthetic." 10

In the mid-1950s, Bense read the essay "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Shannon and Weaver,11 which had already been published in 1949 and introduced a technical-mathematical information theory and a simple communication model inspired by telecommunications engineering: Sender – Channel – Receiver. Shannon and Weaver's theories and models were subsequently taken up outside the field of telecommunications and applied to human communication. Bense was immediately fascinated by the method of mathematically and statistically calculating the information content of a message.12 Order and disorder play at most an indirect role in information aesthetics.

 

The aesthetic measure now feeds exclusively on the probability with which the signs occur statistically – and this can change correlating with more or less order, but does not have to. The less probable the occurrence of a sign, the higher the measure of information associated with it. In reverse conclusion, the more probable a communicative event is, the less information it contains. So if, in extreme cases, a message can be completely predicted before receiving it, you no longer need to transmit it – the information would be zero. That sounds logical at first. However, taking a closer look, you quickly realise that this mathematical model may be useful for calculating the channel capacity of a technical communication medium – after all, that is what Shannon developed it for – but that it is not too suitable for analysing a human communication processes, as the model operates completely independently of content and meaning. An example: A random-generated arrangement of coloured squares contains no (or little) usable information for humans. If the same colour squares are arranged to form a mosaic picture, a viewer may ascribe higher information content to it – in complete contrast to Shannon's formula. As long as the repertoire of signs, in this case the number of different colours, and the frequency of occurrence remain the same, the mathematical information content according to Shannon also remains unchanged. As long as the pictorial elements remain the same, it makes no difference to the information-aesthetic measure whether they form a geometric pattern, the image of a flower or chaotic noise. The content and meaning of a message are in fact completely irrelevant when it comes to its technical transmission alone. Whether by telegraph, telephone or e-mail, the medium is usually not interested in the content. Vows of love are transmitted just as stoicly as a shopping list. In the end, Shannon's formula results in – as always when doing the maths – a mere number. For example 32.88 or 191.02.13 Be it colour, form, contrast, meaning or context: all this disappears in a single number.

Bense does not perceive this disappearance as a loss, but as liberation: the meaningful and possibly sentimental interpretation of literature and the visual arts is to be exorcised by the precise methods of the natural sciences. Not only does he attack art history, he also demands that aesthetics should refrain from the "chatter" of sociology and psychology.14 In the age of technical civilisation, even art (the word design is rarely used in Bense's writings) should be spoken about in an objectified manner. Objectivised here means measuring, calculating – and as a result, numbers. These radically formulated demands may also have contained a considerable degree of provocation. While the debate in southern Germany at that time mainly revolved around Bense's strict atheism,15 in literary studies his demand that in future even poems should only be analysed "in terms of the amount of information they contain" 16 may have caused welcome outrage. However, it would also be wrong to reduce his enthusiasm for calculation and the avoidance of vague discussions of meaning to pure provocation. This attitude is too widespread in both the Stuttgart and Ulm contexts for that. Frieder Nake sees this also as a reaction to the Nazi era: "In this way, Bense is reacting – in my interpretation – to the experience of fascism: everything that tends towards meaning also tends towards emotion. And once you have thrown people into emotions, you can play with them wonderfully. Then the powerful can do whatever they want with them." 17 According to this logic, the most effective weapons against emotional manipulation are "objective" scientific methods, education and information. The name of the department is also programmatic in this sense.

 

 
From a lesson with Max Bense in 1956: "Reportage about a picture. Representation of an aesthetic production in the form of photos, drawings, texts." Student: Gui Bonsiepe. The colour distribution of a picture painted by Bonsiepe (top) is analysed in order to calculate the aesthetic "information content". The result: 191.02 bits.

In the preface to the second volume of his aesthetica series, Bense wrote in 1956 that the aesthetic theory of signs in the first volume was now complemented by an information-theoretical aesthetic: "Sign processes are transformed into information processes." 18 Bense now understands semiotics as something that is absorbed into information theory. Elisabeth Walter-Bense, on the other hand, said in an interview in 2003 that she was not too enthusiastic about information theory. For her, information theory was at best a side branch of semiotics.19 She was proved right in her scepticism. Bense also seemed to gradually lose interest in information theory, and in the 1960s the subject appeared less and less frequently in his list of publications.20

The hope of seeing his information aesthetic theories applied in practice at the HfG 21 was largely disappointed by the Ulm practitioners.22 The information-theoretical approach is not helpful enough in the design process. Without distancing himself from his mathematical-statistical theories of the 1950s, Bense increasingly turns back to semiotics from the mid-1960s onwards – a discipline in which meaning and its encoding, mediation, and construction occupy a bit more space.

 

Cybernetics

Before information theory and aesthetics dominated Bense's theories in the second half of the 1950s, he was concentrated on cybernetics – the science of control and regulation. Bense had already read Norbert Wiener's standard work on cybernetics in 1949: "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine".23 Several aspects made Wiener's work attractive to Bense: the materialistic, atheistic approach of attributing machines, animals and humans to the same principle; the conviction that spirit arises from matter; and the idea that the technical world, the human environment – basically the whole world – is steerable and controllable, thus shapeable, designable. On the one hand, this idea implies that people must take their fate into their own hands and should not rely on the hand of God or the "invisible hand" 24 of the market. On the other hand, steering and controlling also sounds like domination. Bense speaks of the "fundamental feasibility of the world".25 The notion that humans can control the world with the help of technology has, from today's perspective, a flavour of technocratic feasibility-mania and "male fantasy of omnipotence" (Ursula Wenzel). The Second World War had shown that technological progress also led to industrialised war, industrial murder and the atomic bomb. Nevertheless, an unbroken optimism about technology prevailed until the late 1960s. The Concorde and the rotary engine were developed without any worries about fossil fuel, and the absolute safety of nuclear power stations was merely a question of the redundancies of technical systems. The "limits to growth" 26 were not yet an issue, and CO2 was only known in soda water.

Cybernetics is interesting in another respect: it is one of the precursor disciplines of computer science. It is therefore part of a delicate line of tradition that leads from the Ulm School of Design to computer science and interface design. The "Stuttgart School" [the community around Bense in Stuttgart] was certainly more important for (German) computer science than Ulm. Some Bense students from Stuttgart became pioneers of computer graphics in particular.27 On the Ulm side, it was above all Gui Bonsiepe whose professional path repeatedly crossed the cybernetics-informatics line 28 and finally developed a design theory that traces design back to the key term "interface".29 A term introduced into product design by Herbert Simon 30, which today is used (incorrectly) almost exclusively in the sense of "user interface of computer programs".

In the early 1970s, Bonsiepe led the design team of the Chilean Cybersyn project, which aimed to cybernetically control Chile's industry nationalised by Allende 31 (see Gui Bonsiepe's review in this volume). A project that is often referred to as the "Socialist Internet". It was based on the conviction that processes that are too complex and multi-layered for humans can be regulated with the help of cybernetic control – also a country's economy. In contrast to the liberal dogma that a functioning economy can only be guaranteed by the uncontrolled "invisible hand" of the market, cybersyn was based on the conviction that the economy is also designed, can be designed – and must be actively designed in the interests of a fairer society. Cybernetics was hoped to eliminate the injustices of the capitalist economy without having to accept the disadvantages of the rigid and inflexible planned economy of the Eastern Bloc socialism. Cybersyn was to become the control centre of a cybernetic planned economy, providing information and control in "real time" enabling constantly adapted management – instead of setting fixed production quotas in a five-year plan. These concepts were also discussed in the GDR [communist eastern Germany] in the 1970s. The main protagonist there was Georg Klaus, philosopher, cyberneticist and semiotician at Humboldt University in East Berlin – who had completed his doctorate under Bense in Jena in 1948. However, further discussion of a cybernetically dynamised planned economy was prevented by the orthodox and Moscow-loyal orientation of the GDR rulers.32 Whether Cybersyn would have worked in Chile – or whether it would have turned out to be an underestimation of the complexity of economic relationships driven by cybernetic euphoria – we will never know. The experiment was aborted before it could even get off the ground by the US-backed military coup of 1973. It is an irony of history that today computer programs based on comparable control and management concepts co-determine globalised financial and stock market trading.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
Max Bense in class at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, 1955. Photos: Hans G. Conrad

The "Naturalisation" of Information and Communication

The enthusiasm for cybernetics in the 1950s and '60s and the dream that everything could be controllable and regulable seems exaggerated today. Cybernetics has fallen silent, or rather it has become an object of technological and cultural history.33 However, the claims of the natural sciences to explain everything have not disappeared along with cybernetics. Quite similar forms of underestimating complexity were found in relation to artificial intelligence in the 1960s. At that time, it was predicted that perfect translation machines would be developed in just a few years. What translation software can do today is amazing, but very far from perfect – despite a forty-year delay. [editor's note: This was written in 2014. Today, ten years later, the present English translation is based on an AI-based translation. However, it still required stylistic editing in almost every sentence, and also in some cases of severe semantic errors] The genetics euphoria of the 1990s has also subsided. Although there are genetically "designed" plants, there is not yet a single functioning gene therapy for diseases – these were also announced twenty years ago [editors note: again, ten years and one pandemic after, the development of "genetic healing" has become closer, but is still lagging behind the past proclamations]. Today, the neurosciences seem to claim sole sovereignty in explaining what humans are and how they function. Their findings however, are often quite banal and of little practical use.34 Obviously their scientific research method satisfies the longing of many disciplines for supposed objectivity. In recent years, a lot of researchers of humanities and arts have relented and tried to ennoble their work with the seemingly objective measurement of brain activity. This is being indicated by the prefix "Neuro-" to their respected disciplines: Neuro-Management and Neuro-Leadership, Neuro-Psychoanalysis and Neuro-Sociology, and of course Neuro-Marketing, and – that one was really missing: "Neuro-Web-Design".

Questions of human behaviour are turned into questions of the natural sciences, which can only and exclusively be answered with the means of the natural sciences.

The philosopher of technology Peter Janich criticises this "naturalisation" and the associated devaluation of other disciplines such as philosophy, sociology or cultural studies.35 For him, already the transfer of the terms "information" and "communication" introduced by Shannon/Weaver to the technical processes of communications technology are mere metaphors. According to Janich, a machine cannot "communicate", and a gene does not contain "information". For him, information and communication are terms linked to human consciousness. Janich is not bothered by the equation of human actions and machine activity for religious reasons. Comparisons between living beings and automatons may bring religious affronts, but they work very well as models and can be extremely helpful – both for technology and for the life sciences. It is only the dogmatic reduction to this physical-causal view and the associated devaluation of socially and culturally orientated approaches that is problematic.36 The precision of scientific language also suffers from the metaphors. Every cybernetic control mechanism could be described "in physical parameters alone, without using a single cognitive […] word".37 Using the popular example of a heating thermostat: The so-called "thermal sensor" naturally does not sense anything. It knows neither goals nor purposes and it does not pass on any "information" to the heating valve. The thermal sensor is usually simply based on a wax motor that merely deforms depending on the temperature, thereby opening and closing a valve. Technical theories, however, seem to carry more weight when they are charged with linguistic, communicative or cognitive concepts.38

 

Back to Bense and the Information Department. Only the five students in the first two years of 1954/55 and 1955/56 were able to enjoy the "full dose" of Bense. Bense left the HfG before a second, even smaller group took up their studies of information. There was only one male student in the first generation, and the topics of information theory and cybernetics only appeared sporadically in his professional practice. The women in the Information department were even less receptive to "naturalisation". They spent most of their later professional lives in the humanities and social sciences – disciplines that still defy the complete naturalisation of science today. Nevertheless, Bense's precise analytical approach and the systemic aspect of cybernetics must have had a formative influence. But at this point at the latest – instead of speculating further about how others were influenced – I should refer to the contributions collected in this volume by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Elke Koch-Weser Ammassari, Margit Staber-Weinberg and Gui Bonsiepe.

 

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Citation
David Oswald "Max Bense and the Information Aesthetics" translated by David Oswald (2024), available online at http://www.hfg-ulm.info/en/department-head_max-bense.html. Original work published as "Max Bense und die Informationsästhetik" in: David Oswald, Christiane Wachsmann, Petra Kellner (eds) Rückblicke. Die Abteilung Information an der hfg ulm. Ulm, 2015, pp. 116–123. 

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