attempt to establish a mathematically rigorous aesthetic theory that is based on objectification of perception and effort to bridge philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, sciences, and art theory

— https://medium.com/designscience/1960s-d611bd76d056

• influenced by Cybernetics, Claude Shannon, communication theory, Birkhoff's semiotics
• main authors: Max Bense, Abraham Moles
• 1960
• Max Bense proposed machine-oriented aesthetics
  • both for measuring "aesthetic quality", and for creating (early computer art)
    • generative process of creation shifted the interest from the "art piece" to "process"
  • Geoerg Ness did PhD under Max Bense
• Abraham Moles
  • related to cybernetics
    • interested not in "thinking machines" but "machines that make us think" (Tools for Thinking, Bicycle for the Mind)

    The work of art is more amenable to cybernetic analysis than a work of science, precisely because its criteria of validity are much less exact and above all much less coherent than those of the latter. Non-representational art in particular claims only that a certain quantity of order is present in the product to give it a consumer value, without indicating the distribution of that quantity of order existing in the different levels of this hierarchy of utilized semantemes.