• It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.

    Norbert Wiener - The Human Use of Human Beings (1964)

  • When I give an order to a machine, the situation is not essentially different from that which arises when I give an order to a person. In other words, as far as my consciousness goes I am aware of the order that has gone out and of the signal of compliance that has come back. To me, personally, the fact that the signal in its intermediate stages has gone through a machine rather than through a person is irrelevant and does not in any case greatly change my relation to the signal. Thus the theory of control in engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical, is a chapter in the theory of messages.

    Norbert Wiener - The Human Use of Human Beings (1964)

  • What one emphasizes when listening to music is in part dependent on what one has read about it. Musical perception, even of the most impartial kind, which in reality does not exist, is permeated with reminiscences of what one has read, with traces of literary memory. Even the endeavor to arrive at a 'purely musical' form of listening is conveyed by literature, either as the work of aesthetic awareness or as the fulfillment of a postulate which is hardly more than 150 years old.

    Carl Dahlhaus (1988)

  • Although it is the general aim of the composer to operate the computer in keeping with his own objectives, this situation is influenced by a feedback effect, i.e., a subliminal tendency on the part of the operator to think in mechanical terms. The tension between these two processes creates problems of the relationship between technology and creativity, which can only be solved by a systematic evaluation of aesthetic categories.

    Roland Kayn (1975)

  • When we speak or write, we are in fact engaging in very fast selections of signs in our repertory, in an organizational and sometimes very flexible order, which is prescribed by the norms of the system; we do not realize this fact because the process is already automatized by means of the constant and reiterated learning feedbacks. ... Statistically speaking, the laws commanding the integrated process are those of chance & choice, that is, the laws of probability.

    Décio Pignatari (2003)

  • Entropy theory ... is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.

    Rudolf Arnheim (1974)

  • Unless the piece in question has the length of the present, we cannot apprehend it in its entirety since it is a temporal, sequential message that exceeds our perceptual thresholds in different ways.

    Christian Benvenuti (2010)

  • One message featuring highest intelligibility ... and another featuring highest originality (an overwhelmingly random sequence), that is, inversely related measures, may be actually similar in regard to their aesthetic meaning, in that they both have “nothing” to say.

    Christian Benvenuti (2010)

  • Everything in Nature is modeled like spheres, cones and cylinders. We must learn to paint based on these simple forms and only then will we be able to do everything we want.

    Paul Cézanne

  • The English language, in fact most Western languages, suggests through its tense structure that reality can only be contained in the concept of a past, a present, and a future which rather incongruously implies that man is capable, like a god, of standing outside the time continuum. The hubris of Western man might very well lie in the priority-setting propensity for quantitative reasoning.

    Marshall McLuhan

  • Western man thinks with only one part of his brain and starves the rest of it. By neglecting ear culture, which is too diffuse for the categorical hierarchies of the left side of the brain, he has locked himself into a position where only linear conceptualization is acceptable ... As neurosurgeon Joseph Bogen puts it, the linear sequential mode of the left hemisphere underlies language and analytical thought. The right hemisphere of the brain, which is principally concerned with pattern recognition of an artistic and holistic quality, grasps the relationship between diverse parts readily and is not bound up with a rigid sequence of deductions ... Qualitative thinking ... is always composed of multi-sensual elements.

    Marshall McLuhan

  • The term sensus communis in Cicero's time meant that all the senses, such as seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touch, were translated equally into each other. It was the Latin definition of man in a healthy natural state, when physical and psychic energy were constant and distributed in a balanced way to all sense areas ... In any cultural arrangement, trouble always occurs when only one sense is subjected to a barrage of energy and receives more stimulus than all the others. For modern Western man that would be the visual state.

    Marshall McLuhan

  • This is probably the fundamental idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk: to create a self-contained world.

    Hans Ulrich Obrist (2014)

  • The history of modernism is intimately framed by that [gallery] space ... An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth-century art ... Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics.

    Brian O'Doherty

  • I wasn't depressed, I was curating despair.

    Colson Whitehead

  • Auf der einen Seite befindet sich das Subjekt, der ausführende Musiker, auf der anderen Seite das Objekt, das Musikinstrument. Dazwischen steht die Partitur, welche die Transformationen der Körperorgane des Subjekts im Umgang mit dem Objekt als Phasenzustände beschreibt, aufschreibt und vorschreibt ... Also solche nimmt die Partitur bzw. Musiknotation zwei wesentliche Methoden der modernen Medienwelt vorweg, nämlich Algorithmus und Schnittstelle. Die Partitur ist eine Schnittstelle für die reale Welt und als solche Interaktionsdesign. Sie ist aber auch ein Algorithmus, eine Handlungsanweisung, die aus einer endlichen Folge bzw. Menge von Regeln und eindeutig bestimmten Elementaranweisungen besteht, die den Lösungsweg eines Problems exakt und vollständig beschreiben.

    Peter Weibel (2008)

  • Since the 1960s, art has foregrounded the conceptual, concerning itself with questions that the eye alone cannot answer, questions regarding the conditions of art's own possibility. The conceptual turn is not intrinsically an inward turn from gaze to navel gaze. Instead, conceptualism allows art to volunteer its own corpus, its own ontology, as a test case for the definition of categories.

    Seth Kim-Cohen (2009)

  • The blink of an eye lasts three hundred milliseconds. The blink of an ear lasts considerably longer. From birth to death, the ear never closes ... The ear is always open, always supplementing its primary materiality, always multiplying the singularity of perception into the plurality of experience.

    Seth Kim-Cohen (2009)

  • But just as it refers to a certain consciousness of time, a sense of “newness” about the present, modernity embodies also a system of knowledge about the world. To be modern implies a manner of apprehending the world such that its present possibilities and element of change are seized upon toward fuller development.

    P. Nadal (2013)

  • Even if sight is in some ways the privileged sense in European philosophical discourse since the Enlightenment, it is fallacious to think that sight alone or in its supposed difference from hearing explains modernity.

    J. Sterne (2003)

  • The form of this work [Couleurs de la cité céleste] is determined entirely by colors. The melodic or rhythmic themes and the tonal or timbral complexity evolve like colors. In their constantly renewed permutations one finds (by analogy) warm and cold colors, and complementary colors that influence their neighbors, shading down to white or toned down to black.

    Oliver Messiaen (1963)

  • Polyphonic painting is superior to music insofar as the temporal is more spatial in this genre. The concept of simultaneity is even richer here.

    Paul Klee (1917)

  • I mean, similar to the counterpoint and harmonics that exist in music one must also endeavor in painting to create a specific theory regarding artistic contrasts of every kind and their harmonious equilibrium.

    Adolf Hölzel (1904)

  • Form based on repetition is premised on a type of reception in which perception evolves as a proactive, creative activity in space and time.

    Dieter Daniels and Sandra Naumann [?] (2010)

  • If the displaying gesture that indicates the idea organizes the primacy of space (or the contour) over time one has a case of "plasticity." If the display organizes the evident primacy of time over space, one has "theater." In both cases the subordinate term (time or space) is not suppressed but organized by the other term.

    A Theatre of Operations: A Discussion between Alain Badiou and Elie During (2007)

  • The conceit of the archive is that it is the repository of answers, of knowable conclusions, of the data needed to explain or understand the past. The reality, however, is that the archive is the troubled genesis of our always-failed effort to unravel the effects of the past on the present; rather than verifiable truths, the archive — and its silences — house the very questions that unsettle us.

    Jennifer Morgan - Accounting for “The Most Excruciating Torment”: Gender, Slavery, and Trans-Atlantic Passages

  • “And is it not for this reason, Glaucon,” said I, “that education in music is most sovereign, because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it, bringing with them and imparting grace, if one is rightly trained, and otherwise the contrary?"

    Plato, Republic, 401d-e