From Energy to Information: Representation in Science
and Technology, Art, and Literature
Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, eds.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
364 pp. Illus. b/w, paper $35.
ISBN 080474176
1. TechnologyHistory.
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
Polar (Posthuman Laboratory for Arts Research)
pepperell@ntlworld.com
"From Energy to Information" is an avowedly interdisciplinary
project both in subject matter and in construction. The introduction
states: ". . . the differences among the practices of scientists,
artists, writers, and engineers may be seen not as fundamental disciplinary
barriers but as a matter of local variations due to divergent representational
goals." (p. 14). What results is a collection of essays that seeks
to chart the complex interactions between different kinds of representation
in the arts and science, proposing as its binding thesis a general shift
in recent history from an essentially thermodynamic understanding of
nature to an essentially informatic one. The book itself originates
in a 1997 symposium of the same title at the University of Texas, and
claims to be the first to deploy so diverse a range of scholars in such
a tightly focused way in this field of inquiry.
In his introductory essay, co-editor Bruce Clarke sets out a chronology
of what he calls: "the historical movement from energy to information
regimes" (p.33). He explains how we arrived at our modern notion
of energy, how it was integral to the growth of nineteenth-century science
and industry, and how it was represented in the popular and literary
imagination, most notably in the widely disseminated idea of the impending
"heat death of the universe". The capacity of ordered energy
to do useful work, and hence drive human progress, was coupled with
an inevitable tendency to dissipation, disorder, and decay the
entropic underbelly of energetic vitality. This dualism found resonance
in mid-twentieth-century theories of information, particularly in attempts
to ensure the integrity of useful data and avoid the loss of signal
in dissipative noise. By the end of the last century, according to Clarke,
the transition was complete, and information enters a transcendent,
autonomous phase for some becoming virtually detached from any
material base and almost the very condition of posthuman existence.
The book then proceeds to interrogate the central thesis from a number
of theoretical standpoints. Norbert Wise, for example, proffers the
idea that nineteenth century thermodynamics radically altered the prevailing
conception of time. Prior to the emergence of energetic theories, the
temporal dimension was regarded as essentially circular and permanent
like ideal planetary motion and, in keeping with its feminine
designation, symbolised by cycles of rebirth and regeneration. As the
transformative power of energy and the irreversibility of entropic decay
was revealed however, time took on a linear dimension which was represented
as masculine and progressive, or potentially destructive. Wise points
out how this gender based demarcation of time was played out in the
social theory of industrial capitalism, themes that are developed in
Bruce Clarkes essay "Dark Star Crashes", which examines
the imaginative treatment of universal heat death in Camille Flammarions
"La Fin du Monde".
In an essay entitled "Energetic Abstraction" Charlotte Douglas
traces the brief span of the Russian revolutionary avant-garde, and
in particular the decisive influence of the energy-centred theories
of both Wilhelm Ostwald and Alexander Bogdanov. This is an outstanding
piece of work ideas are lucidly expressed, research is effortlessly
presented, and it illuminated a whole period of art which I had always
imagined as being embroiled in turgid political idealism. Ostwald, a
prodigious chemist, propagated a monistic world view based on the fundamentally
energetic constitution of nature: "Everything that happens in the
world, " he maintained, "is nothing but a change in energy."
(p. 77). His work profoundly affected the psychologist Bogdanov who,
through the workers educational network that he established, Proletkult,
spread radical theories of art and creativity to serve a progressive
social purpose. Bogdanovs fluid and dynamic conception of universal
energetic change brought him into conflict with Lenins stiff materialism,
with the consequence that he was denounced. But his ideas were to promote
a vital rush of creative activity in which artists sought in various
ways to capture or depict energetic change.
In "Lines of Force" Bruce Hunt gives an engrossing account
of late-Victorian attempts to model quite literally using brass
wheels and elastic bands the evanescent ether then thought to
pervade physical reality. In doing so he reminds us of the risks of
allowing theoretical models of reality to stand in for the reality itself,
and hence confusing analogy with explanation. The employment of analogy
in the absence of explanation is central to Ian F. A. Bells essay
on "The Real and the Ethereal". Commenting on the modernist
verse of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Bell considers the limits of analogy
in literature and science, especially when used to try and visualise
something like an imponderable Aether. At the same time
he recognises the creative potential of analogy which: " . . .
depended upon a yoking together of conceptual dissimilarity and relational
agreement, laying the ground for revised notions of difference that
could be both objectively and speculatively exploratory." (p. 121).
In her key essay, co-editor Linda Henderson proposes the notion of "Vibratory
Modernism" to describe those works of early modernist art that
were imbued with contemporary scientific theories of waves, X-rays,
wireless telegraphy, and ether. Works by Boccioni, Kupka, and Duchamp
are examined in the light of both the artists own comments and
popular theories of matter, space, and energy. The resulting confluence
of science, art, and occultism represents a deliberate attempt on the
part of some artists to render the ethereal into the aesthetic domain.
The materialisation of fleeting energetic impulses was also being undertaken
in the scientific domain, with the development of various devices of
inscription which turned energetic fluctuations into permanent graphical
traces. A rather beautiful essay by Robert M. Brain acts as a kind of
pivot for the whole argument of the book. By tipping us from the inscriptive
devices of the nineteenth century to the servo-mechanisms of mid-twentieth
century analogue computers, Brain identifies a continuity between two
strands of technical development that often seem dissected by the second
world war. The subsequent digitisation of information, despite its economies
of storage and reliability of transmission, took many years to match
the direct-drive efficiency of analogue calculators such as William
Thompsons tide predictor or Vannevar Bushs differential
analyzer. Closing the section of the book dealing with the graphical
inscription of energy, Christoph Asendorf describes in "Bodies
in Force Fields" how a theory of biological membranes was invoked
by Paul Klee and several Bauhaus students to reconcile conflicting energetic
pressures in social life, art, and architecture.
As the focus of the book then shifts to informatics, N. Katherine Hayles
uses an analysis of three literary works to critique the currently popular
notion of an imaginary "free information": ". . . thereby
puncturing the dream of an informational realm that can escape the constraints
of scarcity." (p. 254). The origin of this (literal) debasement
of information is often traced to the enthusiasm for cybernetic ideas
in the latter twentieth century, where information comes to be seen
as autonomous and self-liberating. The post-war emergence of cybernetic
theory and its application in the design of human-machine interaction
is the background for Edward A. Shankens account of Roy Ascotts
engagement with systems and feedback in the experimental art he produced
in the 1960s. In Ascotts "cybernetic vision, art is
less a repository of information than an "intelligence amplifier"
(p. 275) working through and between organic and mechanical processes
to increase human creativity. In his contribution Marcos Novak describes
his vision of "eversion" as ". . . a casting outward
of the virtual into the space of everyday experience" (p. 311).
Novaks essay is a glittering evocation of sensory space
a void filled with reactive sensor units, or sensels, which link the
users actions with invisible computational data. Just as Michael
Faraday had speculated on a void filled with electromagnetic waves of
energy, so Novaks enverted space is a fog of information which
ultimately is about: "puncturing the barrier of computer screens
as we know them and letting virtuality pour out and saturate newspace
. . . Eversion brings reality to sunlight." (p. 323).
Despite the enthusiasm that this book embodies, and will hopefully generate,
one is left with some uneasiness about the symmetry of the narrative
on which its based. Its easy to forget that the Age
of Steam was also the age of the telegraph, which by the mid-nineteenth
century had seen the laying of transatlantic cable. With the rise of
mass literacy and cheap publishing, information was already a ubiquitous
commodity, and it seems likely this would have had some impact on literature,
if not visual art. At the other end of the story, the post-war period
was marked not only by a growth in informatic theory but also by the
massive cultural impact of the nuclear age, promising on
an unthinkable excess of energy. Although this impact is played down
by W. J. T. Mitchell (". . . it was really only a quantitative
extension of the age of energy (p. 362)) it arguably had as great, if
not a greater, effect on the global psyche during this period than the
processing of data. Thus, the historical transition from energy to information
is perhaps not as orderly and comprehensible as many of the contributions
would suggest. Moreover, one might be left with the impression that
the age of energy is somehow over, whereas in fact the current enthusiasm
for permissive social intercourse conducted in data-space may be reaching
its zenith as its very promiscuity debases its exchange-value. In which
case we might turn away from the distractions of easy information toward
an appreciation of our embodied nature, which after all is the ultimate
source of all energetic experience.
There are a couple of other tendencies that should be noted, not least
the impression given of a sort of scientific determinism in which artists
and writers are engaged in a game of catch up, trying to
give expression to the advanced speculations of the laboratory. Whilst
there is little doubt, especially from the prodigious evidence presented
here, that this is often what happens, the influence of literary and
artistic ideas on scientists and theorists would benefit from being
given greater weight. It would also have been worth pointing about that
despite their intimate connections, energy and information are also
essentially different insofar as energy can be nothing other than itself,
whilst information as a signifier is always something other than its
energetic self.
In the current intellectual atmosphere one can be almost suffocated
by the excess of theory devoted to digitality, information, virtuality,
and cybridisation. Any wide-ranging and imaginative consideration given
to the cultural economy of energy, by contrast, is extremely rare (and
in this respect the book is worth getting for the references alone).
Those of us who have been taken to task for deploying the concept of
energy outside the domain of science or engineering will strongly welcome
this thoroughly researched, and by and large, clearly written anthology.
I suspect that it is as an early and vivid contribution to the emerging
field of cultural thermodynamics that "From Energy to Information"
will leave its trace.