ph.d. project description
The Aesthetics of Redundancy
In my Ph.D. project, I am trying to redeem the concept of redundancy. My goal is to demonstrate the value of redundancy to cognition, both in the rather basic aspect of simply understanding an act of communication, but also in the more subtle aspect of gaining aesthetic pleasure from an act of communication.
Why is this necessary? Since the publication of Claude Shannon's Gründerartikel "The Mathematical Theory of Communication," most people have believed that redundancy is something that should be avoided whenever possible. According to Shannon, efficient communication contains as little redundancy as possible. This is demonstrably wrong, but it has given redundancy a bad name.
The theoretical part of my project consists in an attempt to refute Shannon's assumption that entropy equals information. Following the second law of thermodynamics, Shannon argues that the less we know beforehand, the more knowledge is to be gained from a message. What he fails to acknowledge is that we have to possess information about the context of the message in advance. One such prerequisite is knowledge of the code used in the message - usually verbal language. In contradistinction to Shannon I am arguing that any act of communication is an arrangement of pre-existing signs in a pattern - possibly creating new signs. A pattern is always redundant. It follows that there can be no communication without redundancy.
The practical part of my project consists of three case studies:
- Multimedia: A comparative analysis of motor racing as event and works of fiction. I compare a field study of the Le Mans 24 Hours with the computer game Gran Turismo and the artwork "The Snowball." The object is to isolate those fictional features, which recreate the experience of the real event. I intend to show that motor race simulations draw on a pre-established inventory of "props" without which the simulation ceases to work as communication.
- Text: Hypertext and intertextuality are closely related in theory but work in radically different ways in practice. An intertextual reference draws on a pre-established context, whereas hypertext establishes this context on the go. I intend to show how the absence or presence of the referential context influences understanding and aesthetics.
- Music: According to Peter Kivy, music is "the fine art of repetition." The advances of electronic music during the second half of the previous century have led to renewed interest in the repetitive quality of music. In my analysis, I will compare the structure of recent works with the stringent logic of the classical fugue. My object is to demonstrate how 'pure music' or 'music alone' uses repetition to form patterns which are bent, shifted or disrupted in order to create aesthetic pleasure.
2002:
"Analysis of Complex Media. Framing reviewed and redundancy revisited."
Slides for presentation 21 May 2002 at the Creative Environments Research
Studio, University of Malmö, Sweden.
Online
2002:
"If It’s In The Game, It’s In The Game. Om repræsentationer
af motorløb." Slides for presentation 13 March 2002 at the
research seminar Kultur og æstetik i den digitale tidsalder, University
of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Online
2002:
"Redundansens betydning for design." Slides for presentation
1 March 2002 at the conference Designteori, IT University of Copenhagen,
Denmark.
Online
2001:
"Redundancy Analysis. Moving Beyond Usability Studies in Web Design."
Slides for presentation 11 October 2001 at Internet Research 2.0, University
of Minnesota, USA.
Online
2001: "Redundancy
Analysis. Moving Beyond Usability Studies in Web Design." Slides
for presentation 27 March 2001 at Creative Environments, Malmö University,
Sweden.
Online
PowerPoint
2000 format (2.1 MB)
1998: "Computeren
som medie." Speciale. Institut for Film og Medievidenskab, Københavns
Universitet.
PDF
format (484 KB)
Word
2000 format (1.06 MB)
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