Probabilistic Aesthetics of the Avant-Gardes - (Technicities) by Konrad Wojnowski

About the Book

An inquiry into probabilistic modes of sensing and making sense of reality developed by avant-garde artists

Book Synopsis

Konrad Wojnowski argues that the probabilistic revolution, while recognized and investigated by historians of science, has been largely overlooked in the field of art. He shows that the idea that one can perceive and comprehend reality in terms of shifting probabilities was clearly present in the work of many avant-garde artists working in Europe and North America.
Exploring the probabilistic aspects of the avant-garde allows him to establish a dialogue between scientific and artistic forms of knowledge. This is particularly important now, as we become surrounded by probabilistic AIs and while the very nature of cognition is being reinterpreted as inherently probabilistic.

Review Quotes

Well before the late twentieth-century vogue for chaos theory, Konrad Wojnowski reminds us, international modernism had already absorbed creative lessons about the chance nature of the universe from the new sciences of probability and indeterminacy emerging from statistical mechanics and quantum theory. Probabilistic Aesthetics of the Avant-Gardes offers an exhilarating history of these intellectual and aesthetic developments in the works of Boccioni, Breton, Duchamp, Cage, and Xenakis.