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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 0—8047—4176
1. Technology—History.

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 Clarke’s essay "Dark Star Crashes", which examines the imaginative treatment of universal heat death in Camille Flammarion’s "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 worker’s educational network that he established, Proletkult, spread radical theories of art and creativity to serve a progressive social purpose. Bogdanov’s fluid and dynamic conception of universal energetic change brought him into conflict with Lenin’s 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. Bell’s 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 Thompson’s tide predictor or Vannevar Bush’s 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. Shanken’s account of Roy Ascott’s engagement with systems and feedback in the experimental art he produced in the 1960s. In Ascott’s "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). Novak’s essay is a glittering evocation of sensory space — a void filled with reactive sensor units, or sensels, which link the user’s actions with invisible computational data. Just as Michael Faraday had speculated on a void filled with electromagnetic waves of energy, so Novak’s 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 it’s based. It’s 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.

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Updated 2nd February 2003


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