created 2025-02-18, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025languagescientistcomputerscomputational-aesthetics
German philosopher.
His thoughts combine natural sciences, art, and philosophy under a collective perspective and follow a definition of reality, which – under the term existential rationalism – is able to remove the separation between humanities and natural sciences.
Bense – declared opponent of national socialism – knowingly opposed the Deutsche Physik of the Nazi regime which rejected the theory of relativity due to Einstein’s Jewish origin. Therefore, he did not receive his postdoctoral qualification.
Philosophy
For the first time, he phrased a rational aesthetics, which defines the components of language – words, syllables, phonemes – as a statistical language repertoire, and which opposes literature that is based upon meaning
rel:Wittgenstein vs Wittgenstein
He considered the aesthetic and the semantic information to be generally separated and not to be defined until they are used.
After 1984 Max Bense applied his theories of visual art to screen media. Because of that, early thoughts of media studies concerning the internet, especially the concept of digital poetry, may be traced back to Bense.
Information Aesthetics
The goal was to develop a theory that would allow one to measure the amount and quality of information in aesthetic objects, thus enabling an evaluation of art that goes beyond “art historian chatter”. Information aesthetics investigated the numerical value of “the aesthetic object” itself.
Birkhoff’s Mathemathical Measurement of Aesthetic Value
In the late 1920S, Birkhoff had presented a simple formula to measure the aesthetic values of art: M = O / C, where the aesthetic measure (M) is defined as the ratio of order (O) and complexity (C). to. This formula was adapted in very different ways.
the formula, which is commonly known as the metaphor “unity in variety”.
In the early 1930s, Birkhoff spent a year traveling around the world studying art, music, and poetry in various countries. He came up with a formula that encapsulated his insights into aesthetic value and described his theory in a 1933 book, Aesthetic Measure, published by Harvard University Press.
Whereas Bense adhered to the original equation, M = O / C, Moles modified the formula into M = O x C, with drastic implications. If you take low order (O) and low complexity (C), for Bense the measurement (M) can still be high, but with Moles’s modification it would be at a minimum. If both values C and O are high, Bense gets a comparatively low measurement (M), while Moles gets a maximum. Both approaches serve a purpose, and both pose problems.
While for Bense the physical world heads toward chaos (entropy), the world of art heads toward order (negentropy). Both process and order are key terms in his aesthetic, and these concepts deliver the ontological basis for his scientific approach.