Paper 18: Determination and Record: What Birkhoff, Bense, and Moles Could Not Leave Undetermined

Abstract

This paper takes as its starting point a question rather than a historiographical verdict: not whether informationaesthetics failed to produce an adequate measure of the aesthetic object, but whether a measure designed to producea determinate value can recognize an outcome whose significance consists precisely in remaining undetermined.Revisiting Birkhoff's aesthetic measure and its reformulation by Bense and Moles — a ratio and, in Moles' case, aproduct of order and complexity, both built to terminate in a determinate value — the paper identifies two points atwhich this architecture cannot accommodate material that resists closure: the treatment of boundary conditions at theextremes of the formula, and an originality measure that presupposes a reference population against which rarity canbe computed. Two aspects of the E=mc Thought Principle (Mayumi, Paper 1) are examined by contrast, each built toleave a corresponding term open rather than forced to closure. The comparison is then tested against a documentedcase: Cut & Build (Mayumi, Paper 17), a sculptural practice developed independently of information aesthetics, inwhich two works produced under identical formal constraints yielded different classes of outcome — one legible,retrospectively, in Birkhoff's own vocabulary of rotational correspondence, the other not — and in which thisdifference was recorded as two findings rather than resolved into a ranked value. The paper does not overturn theretrospective judgment, surveyed in Culture, Theory and Critique's 2025 special issue on information aesthetics (Pao2025), that the project failed; it asks what that judgment reveals about the architecture that produced it.