Μεταμορφώσεις της εντροπίας στη σύγχρονη τέχνη

Η πρώτη και πιο κοινή προσέγγιση ερμηνείας του όρου εντροπία θα ήταν ως η αυθόρμητη τάση της φύσης να κινείται σε όλο και πιο άτακτες δομές. Δεν είναι όμως μόνο αυτό. Η εντροπία και ο 2ος Θερμοδυναμικός Νόμος, ο οποίος την πλαισιώνει στην επιστήμη της Φυσικής, εκτός από την αταξία σχετίζονται επίσης με τον βαθμιαίο και αναπόφευκτο εκφυλισμό της συνολικής κοσμικής ενέργειας -κάτι που συνεπάγεται τον επονομαζόμενο θερμικό θάνατο του σύμπαντος-, με τον μονοδιάστατο χρόνο αλλά και με την πληροφορία. Στην παρούσα μελέτη επιχειρήθηκε η ανάδειξη της επίδρασης που είχε στην δυτική τέχνη η γνωριμία με τις κοσμολογικές επιπτώσεις του 2ου Θερμοδυναμικού Νόμου μέσα από την έρευνα καλλιτεχνών των οποίων η δουλειά ερμηνεύει, αναδεικνύει, εφαρμόζει μεταφορικά ή μεταφράζει τις βασικές εκφάνσεις της εντροπίας, είτε έχοντας εμπνευστεί άμεσα από αυτήν, είτε δια μέσου συγγενειών με συστήματα σκέψης και καλλιτεχνικής δημιουργίας, που προσομοιάζουν ή διερευνούν το θερμοδυναμικό μοντέλο. Με κύριο μεθοδολογικό άξονα τη θεωρία των Ilia Prigogine και Isabelle Stengers πάνω σε θερμοδυναμικά συστήματα που βρίσκονται σε συνθήκες μακράν της ισορροπίας και τη Μαθηματική θεωρία της επικοινωνίας των Claude Shannon και Warren Weaver, και βάση των χαρακτηριστικών της εντροπίας που προκύπτουν από αυτές, πραγματοποιείται η διερεύνησή της στα πολιτισμικά τοπία των τελευταίων 60 χρόνων, όταν άρχισε δηλαδή να διαμορφώνεται και, στη συνέχεια, αναδύθηκε αυτό που ονομάζουμε σήμερα μεταμοντερνισμό. Μέσα από την παρουσίαση 17 ενδεικτικών καλλιτεχνών που καλύπτουν τη χρονική αυτή περίοδο, διαμορφώνεται μια πρώτη συστηματική καταγραφή καλλιτεχνικών πρακτικών και θεωρητικών προσεγγίσεων της εντροπίας, ενώ ταυτόχρονα προτείνεται ένα νέο πρίσμα ανάγνωσης του φαινομένου στην τέχνη. Αφενός, ως φαινομένου δυναμικού και δημιουργικού, όπως προκύπτει από τα ερμηνευτικά πλαίσια των Prigogine-Stengers και Shannon-Weaver και αφετέρου ως ένα φαινόμενο, η ανάδυση και εξέλιξη του οποίου υπήρξαν άρρηκτα συνδεδεμένες με τη μεταμοντέρνα σκέψη.

‘DEEP-FRIED’ AND DENATURALIZED: CRITIQUING MEMETIC META- ONTOLOGIES

In this paper, I have sought to introduce and outline the trend in Internet meme-making know as 'deep-frying' and explain its significance as a method of user critique within a naturalized medium. How do images that confuse and repel the casual viewer through profanity, enthusiastic emoji usage, over-saturation, repeated compression, bubbling/ warping, and excessive lens flaring effectively question the memetic paradigm? Firstly, by understanding memes as Hito Steryl's transgressive 'poor images' that circulate to produce communities of content creators and consumers that stand in opposition to the state-sponsored rich image making complex. Further, through the application of work by Rolande Barthes, Claude Shannon & Warren Weaver, Scott Contreras-Kotterbay & Łukasz Mirocha, and Rosa Menkman, I have produced a critical examination of the formal practices that elucidate this phenomenon, on the level of the linguistic & iconic message, noise level, and redundancy. Lastly, I propose an orientation of these works within a diverse corpus across various major social media as a networked art practice in keeping with the tenants of the New Aesthetic.

Rockefeller Bureaucracy and Circumknowing Science in the Mid-Twentieth Century

This article examines evaluation principles and techniques and their associated bureaucratic practices from the early decades of Rockefeller science philanthropy. I characterize the distinctive kinds of expertise about science that such philanthropy presumed and cultivated based on analyses of, first, documents connected to interventions in European and South American mathematics and, second, a 1946 handbook prepared by Warren Weaver to guide new programme officers. Rockefeller officers developed elaborate infrastructures for understanding and intervening in the personal and institutional conditions of scientific investigation, while deliberately diverting attention away from the particulars of the science they supported. Their approach, indicative of operating strategies and assumptions for scientific funding bodies in this period, shaped access and authority across the major enterprises of late modern science, defining both what science and which scientists could benefit from new resources and opportunities.

Conclusion: Wounding Transmissions

“Transmission” is a term used, curiously enough, in both technology and psychology. In the former, it denotes the transfer of messages from one point to another, a view that was principally theorized by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Technologically speaking, transmission names the conveyance of information from sender to receiver through a designated channel by means of symbols or signals. This technical formulation of transmission constitutes the operational basis of numerous media technologies. In psychology, transmission is often used to describe the way behavior and symptoms of traumatized parents are transferred to their children, causing transgenerational trauma. Such transmission can be direct or indirect, overt or covert; indeed, transmission of trauma might be the result of either over-disclosure of knowledge and facts, or of under- disclosure, even of persistent silence, which “can often communicate traumatic messages as powerfully as words.” In both technological and psychological uses, transmission denotes a unilateral handing over across space and/ or time. But clearly psychological transmission implies more than the mere delivery of messages: it involves a delivery that exceeds that of meaning or information proper, a transmission taking place as though beyond words, on the affective rather than on the cognitive level. This book has posited media as linking the two senses of transmission above by virtue of the technological capability of effecting impact in excess of message, and contact in excess of content. And nowhere are the stakes in linking technological and psychological transmissions higher than in the mediation of trauma. In this book I have advanced an argument about the deep association of media and trauma. The media discussed here—radio, videotape, television, digital, and virtual—comprise different instantiations of the mediation of trauma: the ways media technologies sustain and convey the experience of unsettling experience. Media reach to the Real, and in so doing make available a register whose registration is of corporeality itself. Bodies find expression through media in the Real, revealing materiality as a common substratum.

Everything is Noise: Don Delillo’s White Noise and the Affectivity of Media, Religion, and Divination

This paper provides a theoretical defense of the concept of noise, borrowed and loosened from the field of information theory, as a heuristic tool for discussing mediation as divination and exploring the intersection of media studies and religious studies. I first provide a theoretical primer for the concept of noise as it is articulated by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver and developed in media studies by Friedrich Kittler and in religious studies by Mark Taylor. Then, a close reading of Don Delillo’s White Noise draws out the potential of noise to highlight media’s ability to provide spiritual meaning and truth through an affect of divination. Finally, I connect these themes to current conceptions of media’s relationship to truth as well as recent anthropology on religious divination, suggesting the utility of noise to aid in scholarly efforts to materialize both media studies and religious studies as they engage with affect theory.

Pratyabhijñā Apoha Theory, Shannon-Weaver Information, de Saussurean Structure and Peircean Interpretant Agency

This paper builds upon my earlier studies, in interpreting interculturally how the Kashmiri nondual Śaiva thinkers, Upaladeva (c. 900-950 CE) and Abhinavagupta (c. 950-1020 CE), in their Pratyabhijñā philosophical theology respond to and reinterpret the Buddhist semantic theory of reference as the exclusion of the inapplicable (anyāpoha). It engages the issues in the Pratyabhijñā debate with the Buddhists, with the interrelations of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s theory of Information, de Saussurean structuralist semiotics and Peircean pragmatic semiotics.

Teorías sistémicas de la comunicación

Las teorías sistémicas de la comunicación se derivan de la deconstrucción de la teoría matemática de la comunicación y del modelo de transmisión de Claude Shannon y Warren Weaver. Refiriendo a la pregunta irresuelta sobre la identidad de un mensaje para distintos observadores, estas teorías desarrollaron un modelo selectivo de comunicación. En función de superar el modelo ingenieril de la señalización (en vez de comunicación) propuesto por Shannon y Weaver, las teorías sistémicas no asumen que un mensaje es seleccionado de un set de mensajes posibles, sino que el set de posibles mensajes, así como el mensaje que será seleccionado de ese set (contexto), debe ser construido por los participantes de la comunicación.

Self-organization of meaning and the reflexive communication of information

Following a suggestion from Warren Weaver, we extend the Shannon model of communication piecemeal into a complex systems model in which communication is differentiated both vertically and horizontally. This model enables us to bridge the divide between Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the self-organization of meaning in communications and empirical research using information theory. First, we distinguish between communication relations and correlations among patterns of relations. The correlations span a vector space in which relations are positioned and can be provided with meaning. Second, positions provide reflexive perspectives. Whereas the different meanings are integrated locally, each instantiation opens global perspectives – ‘horizons of meaning’ – along eigenvectors of the communication matrix. These next-order codifications of meaning can be expected to generate redundancies when interacting in instantiations. Increases in redundancy indicate new options and can be measured as local reduction of prevailing uncertainty (in bits). The systemic generation of new options can be considered as a hallmark of the knowledge-based economy.

From Systems to Organisations

Warren Weaver, writing about the function that science should have in mankind’s developing future, ideas and ideals, proposed to classify scientific problems into ‘problems of simplicity’, ‘problems of disorganised complexity’, and ‘problems of organised complexity’ — the huge complementary class to which all biological, human, and social problems belong. Problems of simplicity have few components and variables and have been extensively addressed in the last 400 years. Problems of disorganised complexity have a huge number of individually erratic components and variables, but possess collective regularities that can be analysed by resourcing to stochastic methods. Yet, problems of organised complexity do not yield easily to classical or statistical treatment since interrelations among phenomenon elements change during its evolution alongside commonly used state variables, affecting behaviour and outcome. Moreover, organisation, the focal point in this complementary class, is still an elusive concept despite the gigantic efforts undertaken since a century ago to tame it. This paper addresses the description, representation and study of phenomena in the ‘problems of organised complexity’ class. Grounded on relational mathematical constructs, a theoretical framework providing operational definitions and schemes for formally modelling organisations and interaction of organisations is introduced. This framework extends the general systems’ concept and provides a novel perspective for addressing organised complexity phenomena as a collection of interacting organisations.