Information Theory and Esthetic Perception by Abraham Moles

First published in French in 1958, and drawing from Claude Shannon’s Information Theory as well as George David Birkhoff, Moles aimed to use techniques of information theory to analyze art. In other words, he sought to view art as communication and analyze it like a science. He developed these theories independently from Max Bense despite both having the aim to of using scientific means to understand aesthetics. Philip Galanter argues that the work of Bense and Moles was instrumental in the early development of complexity science and aesthetics. Moles, for example explored statistical measures of musical order and disorder, valuing it from “banal” to “novel” in an early attempt to understand the relationship between complexity and aesthetics.