A Study on the Information Relationship of Art Aesthetics under the Framework of Information Philosophy ^†

Abstract

Aesthetics is an important branch of philosophy. In traditional philosophy, art aesthetics tends to analyze the subjectivity and perception of knowledge. Under the framework of information philosophy, it requires us to make a fundamental transformation of art aesthetics, which is a unity of direct and indirect existence, as it is known that while artistic images are objective and tangible, the information they convey to the audience is objective but intangible. Artworks are the understandings and recreations of the objective reality and are integrated with the artists’ subjective feelings, and they are meanwhile influenced by the external environments. As an objective form of existence, the information contained in an artwork is a combination of the artwork itself and the transformed subjective feelings, which reflects not only the objective and indirect existence of the work but the subjective and indirect existence of the artist.

1. The Information Relationship in Art Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a unity of direct and indirect existence, as it is known that while artistic images are objective and tangible, the information they convey to the audience is objective but intangible.

“Objectivity and intangibility” refers to the content that objective reality reflects. The “trace” that prevails in objective reality, which are marked and constructed by the objective world, is the specific coding structure between each object. Therefore, in this specific definition (Figure 1), there are essential differences between “objectivity and intangibility” and “objectivity and tangibility”, with the latter marking the existence of the material world [1].

The study on the information relationship is of great importance in the field of art aesthetics. Artworks are the understandings and recreations of the objective reality and are integrated with the artists’ subjective feelings, and they are meanwhile influenced by the external environments. By interpreting the artists’ intentions through artworks, the understandings and aesthetics of the viewers are integrated. In the appreciation and evaluation of the artworks, the viewers’ subjective feelings are the recreation of the artistic images and the eventual result of most research. The study of art aesthetics requires viewers to exclude their perceptual and prior knowledge and to evaluate the information of the images directly. By evaluating the artists’ spiritual information, natural and social environments, the viewers are able to acquire the proper information of an artwork. The study of art aesthetics consists of multiple relationships, including the relationship between the subject and the object, the relationship between the material and the spirits, the relationship between the material and the information, and the relationship between the information and the spirits.

2. The Relationship of Existence between Artworks and Information

As an objective form of existence, the information contained in an artwork is a combination of the artwork itself and the transformed subjective feelings, which reflects not only the objective and indirect existence of the work but the subjective and indirect existence of the artist.

The emergence of petroglyph is a form of self-identity that evidences human beings’ values in primitive society, with its objective and indirect information reflecting their living conditions in primitive society. The images created by this society are significant materials to analyze primitive humans, including their ideologies, modes of production, lifestyles, and social transformations.

Known as the source of art, petroglyph is the earliest imagery created by human beings insofar. It belongs to neither the material world nor the spiritual world. Since there are few materials about the history and the arts of primitive society, the origin of arts remains to be a puzzle in the academic field. Although many scholars have explored this question from different perspectives, they find no credence in existing hypotheses, for example, “game theory” and “witchcraft theory”. Since it has been thousands of years since the primitive humans carved images into rocks, we can hardly understand their original intentions; for example, whether to create artistic images, to paint totems, or to record things. The idea that dominated the creation of petroglyph is the metainformation of the creators.

The evolution of images is a process in which the creator identifies the material world, extracts material information, gives cultural connotations to them, and recreates things. For example, the evolutions of frog patterns and fish patterns imply a worship towards reproduction, indicating a spiritual appeal of primitive humans that only by extending their population could they guarantee the survival and thriving of their whole ethnic group. With the progress of history, images gradually developed into decorative designs and literal symbols, which was also a process from concrete images to abstract symbols. Concrete material information was then deleted and reorganized to create new images, such as loong design, phenix design, and Taotie design.

The complex craft of bronzewares shows a significant transformation in social appendage: from collective dependence to ethnic groups to individual dependence to slave owners, which is an entirely new mode of production and organization. The measurement, parting, and casting of bronzeware require effective communication and collaboration of information. Taotie patterns, such as oxen’s horns and tigers’ mouths, indicate that the rulers have used totems to hold their people in awe. Such as tombs, a spiritual world built in a shared cultural environment is a longitudinal and multidimensional one where life ends and transforms. Bronze-made tomb-guarding beasts are promoted to the level that shares the same value with the statues of the immortals in temples.

Chinese traditional painting is full of images with multiple meanings. The information conveyed by images is different from that by the material world, since the former one tends to be recreated subjectively by people. The information implied by Chinese traditional landscape paintings is constructed by a number of artists ever since the Wei and Jin Dynasty according to their aesthetics. While these paintings tend to show that “mountains are not real mountains, water is not real water”, their artists indicate “real mountains and real water” in the spiritual level as well by creating a multidimensional world of images with their brushes. Additionally, it requires the viewers to be equipped with the same aesthetics skills to the artists to fully understand the information conveyed by the paintings. The information conveyed by Chinese traditional paintings is a typical representation of the “concreteness and nothingness” theory in Taoism, which constructs a subjective and ideal multidimensional world of information through a circulation of “concreteness” and “nothingness”. “Concreteness” and “nothingness” are therefore unified in harmony. “nothingness” is able to express its spiritual information by “concreteness”.

3. The Information of Colors and Psychological Reactions

Colors directly act on human beings’ optic nerves. Due to the different wavelengths and reflectivity, colors arouse different reactions in people’s psychology and physiology. In addition, colors are endowed with different meanings according to different territorial and cultural elements, thus affecting people’s emotions and feelings.

4. The Influence of Artificial Intelligence on Art Aesthetics

With the development of science and technology, artificial intelligence will transform the material reality and information in art aesthetics into holograms, realize the visualization of the original objects and the indirect information, break the boundaries of time and space, and create a multidimensional form. The holographic information of subjective and indirect existence is constructed, which reacts on the state of material existence under the conditions of being tactile and perceptible. The existence of information creates a new form of material existence, thus subverting the previous form of existence, which views “objectivity and tangibility” as the only form of objective reality. Artificial intelligence would reorganize the information in the organic and inorganic world, the information in the biological world, and the information in human society to create a new and convenient information world with a combination of visual, auditory, and olfactory senses. People’s thoughts and behaviors are collected, encoded and reorganized to recreate an intelligent system of information in virtual reality, which gradually comes to the same frequency with human beings. When our body stops to function normally, the information stored in artificial intelligence still exists and can perform human behaviors properly. Thus, an ever-growing and eternal world could be created.