Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.

Themesicon: navigation pathAesthetics of the Digitalicon: navigation pathCybernetic Aesthetics
 
 
 
 
 

icon: previous page

concept of ‹translation› [13] as an artistic activity is very illuminating, and demonstrates the contribution (which is not always acknowledged) made by Moles toward an aesthetics of the digital, especially with regard to the evaluation of the role of the artist and to human-machine communication during the creation of electronic works.

In regard to the generation of works of art, Moles proposes five models: the machinic viewer, [14] the amplifier of complexity, [15] permutational art, [16] the simulation of artistic creation, [17] and the creation machine based on successive integration. [18]

Moles was aware that this «invasion of our thought by mechanical processes» [19] could spark off a regular—quantitative and qualitative— sociocultural revolution that raises a number of questions about the possible consequences of this transformation. «What are the effects on society of the usage of machinic products such as aleatoric music, artificial languages, programmed painting, automatically translated texts, a national library that is reduced to the memory of a computer […]? How might a symbiosis with the machines be envisaged? That is the social aspect of

 

cybernetics. […] Will the artist be replaced by machines for the production of paintings, music, or literature, just as the bookkeeper or manual laborer has already been replaced?» [20]

In order to answer these questions, Moles pointed to three fundamental transformations that have continued to occupy the center ground of media-art theory up to the present day: the transformation of the function of the artist, that of the notion of art, and that of reception. Obviously, the machine will not replace the artist, but it does influence his function in the creative process: «The artist changes into a programmer in the degree to which he accepts this changeover.» [21]

It remains to be examined wherein, according to Moles’ theory, the ‹other vision› of art and artists consists, and in which form the aesthetic results of media art are evaluated by information aesthetics. To assert that aesthetic values are calculable means to carry to an extreme the formalization of the language of art. The formalization processed carried out by creation machines adhere to either the hierarchic order of an organigram, or the order of various planes of analysis.

icon: next page