Frieder Nake

Sichtweisen der Informatik

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Data, Information, and Knowledge

Phenomena of data, information, and knowledge are important for an organization to function. It is therefore important to agree on concepts for those terms. But the nature of such phenomena may not allow for a broad and lasting agreement, because they possess a historical dimension. In this situation we offer semiotic explications of the three terms. Data is viewed here as the syntactic reduction of a sign, information as its semantic reduction, and knowledge appears tied to the pragmatics of the sign. While we do not suggest that the views expressed here are overly new, we feel they offer a useful perspective on the difficult relation between precise formalism and vague insight.

Human–computer interaction viewed as pseudo-communication

Semiotics is considered fundamental to an understanding of human–computer interaction, and of all computer artifacts. Informatics should therefore be viewed as technical semiotics (or semiotics engineering). In particular, interaction between human and computer is characterized by features of communication, a sort of communication, however, that lacks decisive communicative features. It must be identified as a process of pseudo-communication. Interaction is viewed as the coupling of two autonomous processes: a sign process (carried out by the human user) and a signal process (carried out by the computer). Software appears as a semiotic entity in a duplicate way: calculated and calculating, i.e. both as a result and agent of calculations. This dialectics characterizes the class of signs on the computer medium. Problems of software design (functionality and usability design) are specific problems of the coupling of sign and signal processes.

Informatik und die Maschinisierung von Kopfarbeit

In diesem Beitrag108 vertrete ich die Behauptung, es gehe in der Informatik ganz wesentlich um die Maschinisierung von Kopfarbeit oder, anders ausgedruckt, um die Ubertragung geistiger Momente der Arbeit109 auf Computer. Diese Behauptung scheint nicht mehr als eine Selbstverstandlichkeit zu sein. Niemand wird leugnen, das wir es beim Computer und bei seiner Programmierung mit Technik zu tun haben. Das Technik stets Objektivation oder Vergegenstandlichung von Arbeit (und wem das lieber ist: vom tatigen Leben des Menschen) bedeutet, kann ebenso als Allgemeingut (zumindest der philosophischen Diskussion) unterstellt werden.110 Das schlieslich Computer zu den Maschinen und Maschinen zur Technik zahlen, ist trivial. All das zusammengenommen bedeutet aber nicht mehr und nicht weniger, als das die Informatik — als eine wissenschaftliche Disziplin, die es auf technische Hervorbringungen, namlich Computer und Programme, abgesehen hat — Arbeit in Maschinen objektiviert. Es fragt sich lediglich, welche besonderen Momente von Arbeit sie sich vornimmt — oder, anders, fur welche besonderen Bestandteile von Arbeit die Methoden und Verfahren der Informatik (und damit auch die Informatik selbst) entwickelt werden.

Construction and Intuition: Creativity in Early Computer Art

This chapter takes some facets from the early history of computer art (or what would be better called “algorithmic art”), as the background for a discussion of the question: how does the invention and use of algorithms influence creativity? Marcel Duchamp’s position is positively referred to, according to which the spectator and society play an important role in the creative process. If creativity is the process of surmounting the resistance of some material, it is the algorithm that takes on the role of the material in algorithmic art. Thus, creativity has become relative to semiotic situations and processes more than to material situations and processes. A small selection of works from the history of algorithmic art are used for case studies.

Information Aesthetics: An heroic experiment

Information Aesthetics was a short-lived but influential attempt to establish a mathematically rigorous aesthetic theory without subjective elements. It was based on information theory, semiotics and communication theory. It was mainly developed in Germany and France during the 1960s. It not only gained some influence among designers and artists, but also among teachers of art. Its concepts turned out to be reductionist and schematic, which we argue led to its eventual disappearance, if not failure. We provide a retrospective of its assumptions and results, and draw conclusions for current attempts at algorithmically evaluating the aesthetic merits of a work of art.

Return to the Garden of Eden? Learning, working, and living

It is an old dream of humankind to return to the Garden of Eden and live a life of abundance, free of all work and pain. Desires would be satisfied immediately without any effort. However, when all wishes get fulfilled, how would that change the nature of wishing? Would thinking of anything outrageous remain possible? THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 9(4), 505–513 Copyright

The Semiotic Engine: Notes on the History of Algorithmic Images in Europe

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned …1

Evaluation of Creative Aesthetics

This chapter is an edited conversation on the topic of computational evaluation of artistic artefacts. The participants were Harold Cohen, Frieder Nake, David Brown, Jon McCormack, Paul Brown and Philip Galanter. It began at the Dagstuhl seminar on computers and creativity, held in Germany in 2009 and continued over a period of several months via email. The participants discuss their views on the prospects for computational evaluation of both the artistic process and the made artefact.

Creativity in algorithmic art

Early algorithmic art (also called computer art or digital art) is chosen as a case to differentiate three aspects of creative behavior: trivial, personal, and historic creativity. Extending a remark by Marcel Duchamp on the role of the spectator in fully completing a work of art, one - perhaps controversial - position in the history of art of the 20th century claims that the artist only generates the material work, whereas society transforms the work into an accepted work of art. This position leads to differentiation in the concept of creativity. The paper discusses different shades of creativity. It is of interest both to digital art, and to creativity research.