Max Bense
Born 1910 in Strassbourg, France.
Died 1990 in Stuttgart, Germany.
Max Bense was a philosopher with a strong background in the sciences. He was a concrete poet, a supporter of the arts, a prolific author, an inspiring lecturer. He lectured about Charles Sanders Peirce and his semiotics at a time (late 1950s), when hardly anyone did this. Through his and Elisabeth Walther’s research and writings, Stuttgart was for some time an important place for semiotics. Bense was the head of the so-called Stuttgart school. Nobody knows who exactly belonged to it, and who did not. It was a totally informal group that existed by intellectual kinship.
Arguably the most important contribution of Bense’s was his information aesthetics. A fervent fighter against emotion-based value judgments, he considered any artifact as in principle an object also for aesthetic analysis and evaluation. The aesthetic object was a complex sign that functioned in a process of communication. Relying on G. D. Birkhoff’s aesthetic measure of order in complexity, Helmar Frank and Rul Gunzenhäuser defined the micro-aesthetic measure as redundancy in complexity where these two components were measured quantitatively in terms of the information theory of Shannon.
This theory was influential during the 1960s not only with theoreticians of aesthetics, but in the entire community of concrete artists, writers, and designers. Bense’s version of information aesthetics was an aesthetics of the object. Abraham A. Moles developed at the same time an information aesthetics that took off from the observer and, therefore contained also subjective measures.
The term “information aesthetics” gets used again after the year 2000. Its meaning is completely different.
Web site: http://www.max-bense.de/
Member of institution(s): Studiengalerie der TH Stuttgart, Technische Hochschule Stuttgart
Exhibitions organized: Georg Nees: Generative Computergrafik
Max Bense studied mathematics, physics, geology and philosophy at the Universities of Bonn and Göttingen, Germany. In 1938 he received his doctorate in Natural Sciences. His thesis Quantenmechanik und Daseinsmaterialität (Quantum mechanics and the materiality of being) was published the same year. His first job was as a physicist in industry. In 1945 he became Professor and Curator of the University of Jena. In 1948, still before the inauguration of the two separate German post-war states, he fled to West Germany.
(source: Jasia Reichardt: Cybernetics, Arts and Ideas)
Soon after, in 1949, he became a professor of philosophy and theory of knowledge (Wissenschaftstheorie) at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. His critical rationalism caused a long delay before he was fully accepted to the rank of a regular professor (1963). He kept his teaching position at the (then) University of Stuttgart until 1978.
From 1953 to 1958, and again in 1965/66, Bense taught at Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, the famous and influential post-war design school in West-Germany, that was closed down by the provincial government in 1968. For some time in the 1960s, he also taught at Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.
(For more details (in German), see the website dedicated to Bense.
Last change by stefan on 9th of December 2009
There is an exhibition about Max Bense at ZKM Karlsruhe starting today, 7th of February, until 11th of April.
See http://www.bense-und-die-kuenste.de (in German).