Book Review — Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics by Jason Hoelscher

By Hannah E. Christian, Cohort ’20 

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In his most recent book, Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics, Jason Hoelscher, Associate Professor of Art at Georgia Southern University, unfurls the intricate relationship between artistic creation, complex systems theory, and the dynamic networks that shape art's conceptual and material landscapes. 

Hoelscher’s insightful assessment of artworks as “complexity engines that offer ways of [...]  recognizing and appreciating ambiguity as a generative mode of thought” smashes into the technical impermeability and mathematical foundations of information theory with a hammer  (Hoelscher,16). By clearly explaining the two nodes of information theory and entangling (rather than critiquing) their ideas, Hoelscher demonstrates through relevant and interesting examples how art manages to sustain interest over long periods, how it amplifies complexities and possibilities, and how artists in the 1960s grappled with the transition from art as a portal of transcendence to a directly experienced object relation.  

For readers who are not secure in their technical knowledge of information theory, Hoelscher’s first three chapters patiently explain that “art is ‘fuzzy’ information in process” and build up a fractal theory of information ecology (Hoelscher, 3). Hoelscher’s premise is that understanding how aesthetic information creates irresolvable differencing patterns makes it possible to understand the sustained interest in and resonance of artworks over long spans of time. Resonance, rather than resolution, propagates waves of experiential questions that continue to pulse through contemporary artworks and art practices.  

In this way, Hoelscher uses unique examples to expand the reader’s experience of aesthetic information. For example, he ties together not only examples from the traditional field of fine arts but also epiphenomena such as rainbows, letters of the alphabet, Finnegan’s Wake,  quasiperiodic tessellations (see Fig. 1), Star Wars posters, and explanations of car exhaust and the physics of gasoline engines. The skill and finesse with which he ties together each example and relates it to the art information ecology he is weaving is evidence of a deep engagement with information theory and the practices of the artist-philosopher.  

With an intense interest in the shift and development from art as “information in motion across a space” to the entanglement of art “into and as a space,” he describes the evolution of aesthetic thinking as a movement toward adjacent possibilities (Hoelscher 94). Through such disparate examples as FOOD, a restaurant in Soho, Rauschenberg’s telegram This is a Portrait of Iris Clert if I Say So, and the aesthetic lived experiment of the Drop City Commune, the processes described by Hoelscher’s aesthetic information ecology begin to contextualize the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary art as adjacent possibilities of such works. Hoelscher grapples with the aesthetic philosophy behind contemporary art and provides a way to think of complexity without becoming overly complex or technical. 

Hoelscher explains that “such an artworld intensification of intensity itself creates a problematically interesting context for aesthetic information” because the resonant differencing obscures the differencing even further (Hoelscher 228). This incessant complexification of art as it references its own history reflects much of the difficulty of categorizing and critiquing contemporary artwork. In this way, the process demonstrates the fractal nature of information by virtue of the recursive self-similarity and self-referentiality that functions at scale in an aesthetic ecology. 

While readable, the text is dense and packed with interesting analogies and intersectional examples. Such a dense network of connections provides rich material for examining and comparing ideas about information theory, technology, art theory, art history, systems thinking, and/or philosophy. Hoelscher’s thought process is robust and high-speed, and this book packs decades’ worth of material into a mere 250 pages. This is not just a substantive contribution to the field; it is an explosive text that paves the way for an entirely new field of study and will only become more relevant to aesthetic thought in the years ahead. 

Hoelscher, Jason. Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems  Aesthetics. Duke University Press, 2021.