No noise, no party! On Shannon, Aesthetics and one reason for the love of random in digital art practices

The notion of communication system as presented in many works in the humanities is rooted in engineering and the seminal work of Claude E. Shannon titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” - published in 1948. In all, the narrowness of a mathematical understanding of communication, as presented by Shannon, presents severe limitations but also, as it will be shown, possible openings, directions or bridges towards the non-mathematical. In particular, the analysis presented here depicts any notion of communication as being inseparable from any noise. In fact, moving at or beyond the clearly defined mathematical limits that are explicit in Shannon’s theory means to invalidate the very possibility of a communication system at all. It is by looking at these limits, it is argued, that a discourse between a theory of communication and aesthetic theories of digital arts can be renewed. This is not least because in that dialogue might be found a plausible explanation for the ever-growing love of random functions and statistical modelling by many digital art practitioners.