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I have some hope for the possibility of post-hoc evaluation by the generating
program; no hope at all for evaluation by any other program.
Frieder Nake (FN):
Aesthetics is, to a large extent, an evaluative discipline. We
would probably not immediately equate evaluation with judgement. But the two are
related. “Evaluation” is, quite likely, a more technical approach to aesthetic (or any
other) judgement. However, we should be aware of the fundamental difference be-
tween value and measure. The temperature in a room can be measured because an
instrument has been constructed that shows what physicists have defined as a quanti-
tative expression of the quality of “warmth”. The measured temperature is objective
insofar as it has nothing to do with any human being present and experiencing the
room in the actual situation and context. The human's value may be expressed as
hot, warm, cool, or whatever else. Notice these are qualities.
So, in a first approximation, we may relate value with quality (human, subjec-
tive), and measure with quantity (instrument, objective).
The value judgement by a human may be influenced by the measured data deliv-
ered by an instrument. But the two are definitely and importantly to be kept apart
(for intellectual rigour). Even more so in the complex situation of aesthetics.
Aesthetics itself is considered by many as being about our sensual perception of
things, processes, and events in the environment. Hence, the subject matter of aes-
thetics is in itself intrinsically subjective. Those who start from this position cannot
accept the claim that there are objective measures that would substantially contribute
to human judgement.
HC:
However, there have been times when number systems have had special
cultural significance, and consequently aesthetics has been bound up with objective
measures. For example, the Greek canon of human proportion was quite clear about
how big the head should be in relation to the body, and I'm reasonably sure the
sculpture critic would have regarded conformity to, or departure from, that canon as
an aesthetic issue. There are many other examples.
Objective measures are a component of aesthetics when the measures themselves
are important culturally. Today we have no such measures, and attempts to find them
in contemporary artworks seem absurd to me, just as Ghikas's
5
attempts to find
the golden mean in the art of a culture that knew nothing about incommensurable
numbers seems absurd.
FN:
Harold, you are absolutely right. By reminding me of some facts of history,
you make me aware of a psychological hang-up that I now believe I have created in
a dogmatic reaction against Max Bense.
6
Bense, of course, allowed only objective aesthetic measures. He did so in reaction
to German fascism where emotion was the only goal of their grandiose aesthetics
5
Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, a 20th-century Greek artist and academic.
6
Max Bense was an influential German philosopher and Nake's teacher and mentor in his formative
years as an artist exploring the generative possibilities of the computer in the 1960s.
