Claude Shannon Develops Information Theory with A Mathematical Theory of Communication

Claude Shannon’s "A Mathematical Theory of Communication” was published the same year as Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. Max Bense would apply both their works to aesthetics in his pioneering work, Aesthetica (1965), which laid the theoretical foundations of digital and AI art with computer art.

Cybernetics thus played a vital role in both the birth of digital art and artificial intelligence, thus making it one of the single most important moments on the timeline. Max Bense and his role at the University of Stuttgart explains the connection to computer art, specifically. He taught the first European computer artists, Georg Nees and Frieder Nake, leaving an indelible marks on their thinking that last to this day, as this 2018 talk by Nake demonstrates.

Written at Bell Labs, Shannon’s paper “defined in mathematical terms what information is and how it can be transmitted in the face of noise. What had been viewed as quite distinct modes of communication--the telegraph, telephone, radio and television--were unified in a single framework.”

Shannon’s earlier work from 1937 included an early design of a digital circuit around the same time as Konrad Zuse began working on the Z3 and his own digital circuits.