Art as Information Ecology

Art as Information Ecology

Art and information are tightly entangled, as emergent effects of difference (Hoelscher 3).

In the book, Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics, Jason Hoelscher argues that artworks and artworlds function as dynamic, interconnected systems where meaning is produced through complex interactions among creators, audiences, and technologies. For Hoelscher, art should be viewed as an information ecology — a network of information, processes and feedback loops that shape both its creation and reception.

The multiscale feedback relations between artist, artwork, artworld, and world constitute art as an information ecology, a mesh of differential relations that interoperate between, across, and as the artwork and its artworld. Here, artist, work, and world are entangled in their reciprocal potentiations of one another: while the artworld’s distributed field of discourses makes art possible, for example, the artworld itself is made possible by (and as) the aggregate effect of the artworks it makes possible in the first place. Such intertwined generativity back and forth across multiple scales constitutes the artist/artwork/artworld information-ecologic relation. (9)

Art functions within, and as, this information ecology, as a kind of engine of difference — generating information, challenging expectations, and resisting static interpretation. It is in this sense that art becomes a novel kind of information, one in constant state of evolution and proliferation, reverberating across the ecology. Art can be thought of as “a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing — an aesthetic mode of information that remains in formation.” This perpetual movement and instability of artistic objects is precisely their potency — shaping and transforming artistic discourse across time.

Hoelscher gives the example of Frank Stella’s painting The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II (1959) as an exemplary case of a differential object, emphasizing how its deadpan simplicity and intentional rejection of expressive or representational content paradoxically activate complex layers of meaning. Stella’s systematic use of uniformly spaced stripes of flat house paint explicitly foregrounds its physical presence and literal simplicity. Stella himself states explicitly, “What you see is what you see,” asserting the painting's identity as nothing beyond its immediate visual presentation. However, Hoelscher argues that this stark simplicity is precisely what activates the painting’s differential complexity. This deliberate visual minimalism generates meaning precisely through its difference from the rich, historical, and discursive backdrop of the artworld. This example, among countless others, demonstrates how artistic objects are constantly posing the question of what art is, producing a difference that continues to elaborate new answers across artistic discourse.

Sympoietic Art: Information Ecology as Medium

While in this view, art has always been functioning as an information ecology, it is only in the last sixty years that artists have started to engage directly with information ecologies as a medium. Artists have begun to sculpt systems directly, shaping information flows, feedback loops, algorithms and relations. This has produced another categorical shift in the evolution of artistic information, as aesthetic information takes on a life of its own via accelerating techno-social systems.

We can call this emergent trend of art production, Sympoietic Art. Sympoiesis, originally proposed by Beth Dempster and elaborated by Donna Haraway, reworks Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis. Where autopoiesis emphasizes an organism’s ability to maintain and reproduce itself independently, sympoiesis expands this perspective by asserting that no organism is truly solitary. Instead, organisms are interconnected meshes of relational entities, dynamic and responsive nodes within broader ecological and historical systems. Haraway defines sympoiesis as a “making-with,” underscoring that nothing is purely self-organizing but rather always co-constructed through interdependent relationships.

Sympoietic Art operationalizes this notion of relational co-production. Whereas historically Art was bound within the frame or form of an artistic object, Sympoietic Art works directly with systems, facilitating flows of information and relationships across an information ecology.

Sympoietic Art finds resonance and overlap with Systems Art, Relational Aesthetics, and Cybernetic Art. These artistic movements developed the first kernels of artists experimenting with information, relationality, and ecologies, explicitly referencing and finding creativity in systems.

A seminal opening in this movement was Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube. Emerging from Haacke’s interest in cybernetics, ecological systems, and physical processes, the Condensation Cube presents a proto-form of sympoietic relationality. The work consists of a plexiglass cube with a small pool of water inside. The water undergoes constant changes, cycling between its liquid and gaseous states, creating emergent patterns across the cube. This process is dependent on the state of the environment around the cube, including the presence and movement of viewers, thereby producing an open system of interaction. Haacke compared this flux and dynamic responsiveness to a living organism reacting to its environment. The work distills a system that evolves relationally, dissolving rigid boundaries between artwork and audience, a concept central to contemporary Sympoietic practices.

Similarly, Brian Eno’s Music for Airports again uses systems as a creative medium. Characterized by gentle, repetitive structures, Eno’s compositions employ interconnected tape loops and automated sequences, generating an ambient soundscape intended to shape and interact with human emotional states in transitional spaces. Eno’s generative system relies on predefined rules and parameters, allowing the music to unfold organically within a controlled framework, resulting in emergent patterns that evolve dynamically. The compositional system produces self-sustaining sonic ecologies — environments where simplicity, repetition, and subtle variation interact to produce complex, evolving experiences. The work demonstrates how creative agency can reside within the system itself, foreshadowing the generative potential of systems as artistic collaborators.

Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled is another work in the lineage of Sympoietic Art. Huyghe’s Untilled consists of an ecology of animate and inanimate things. Originally exhibited as an installation at Documenta 13, it took place outside of the main gallery space, in an open space in a nearby composting facility. In the installation a host of beings are placed in conversation: a concrete, reclining female figure (a replica of a 1930 sculpture by Max Weber) with a swarming beehive head, the artist’s dog roaming, compost piles growing medicinal and psychotropic plants, industrial materials, and various other things from the overgrown ecosystem. The artwork decenters the human artist, and the work itself, in favor of an interdependent encounter between things. This ongoing encounter, full of contingency, indeterminacy, and aliveness, produces a work that blurs the notion of the artist’s creation. Without a central object, the work becomes an open-ended system — bees pollinate and fly beyond the installation setting, plants decay, ants metabolize and build structures, and the audience meanders and interacts with this ecology, as this ecology.

Gesamtdatenwerk and Computational Ecologies

Roy Ascott's concept of the Gesamtdatenwerk reimagines Wagner’s classical idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”) within the context of digital networks and cybernetic culture. Ascott envisions the Gesamtdatenwerk as a dynamic, interactive art form that integrates data, technology, consciousness, and human collaboration into a unified, immersive digital experience. Unlike Wagner’s model, which combined various traditional art forms into a cohesive whole, Ascott emphasizes the synthesis of digital information, telecommunications, virtual reality, and participant interaction to produce an emergent artwork continually reshaped by collective input, feedback loops, and global connectivity. The Gesamtdatenwerk is a holistic, participatory artwork defined by continuous data exchange, interactivity, and networked consciousness.

Whereas Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was performed in an opera house, however, the site of the Gesamtdatenwerk must be the planet as a whole, its data space, its electronic noosphere. The duration of the work will, of course, ultimately, be indeterminate, since this must be a work in flux and flow, permitting an infinity of interactions, inputs and outputs, collaborations and conjunctions between its many participants. Since reciprocity and interaction are of its essence, such work cannot differentiate between “artist” and “viewer,” producer and consumer. To participate in such a network is always to be involved in the creation of meaning and experience (Ascott 219).

Ascott wrote, in 1989, that “we are a long way from the Gesamtdatenwerk.” Many technological innovations since then have gotten us much closer, such as the internet, VR, improved graphics and sound processing, and a world of sensors and digital interfaces. A notable development for Sympoietic Art has been the creation of blockchains. These distributed computational systems have produced a unique substrate for Sympoietic Art, enabling artists to create programs that run in an open-ended, durable computer.

An emerging term for these works is hypersculptures. “Hypersculptures are network aware, programmatic sculptures that exist on blockchains. Unlike digital art, which is usually presented as the final output of a creative process, hypersculptures are continuously evolving and open to interaction, composition, and reinterpretation. They are dynamic, living artworks enabled by the medium of programmable blockchains” (Neokry). These hypersculptures are a deep expression of Sympoietic Art, allowing artists to create computational ecologies alive with codified protocols, rules, and interactions. Rather than fixed in representation, these works are relationally produced by the artist-facilitated network — the artwork is inseparable from its information ecology and draws on that ecology for its aesthetic functioning.

Terraforms by Mathcastles is a pioneering example of a Sympoietic hypersculpture. The generative art project resides entirely on the Ethereum blockchain, envisioned as a dynamic and perpetual artwork comprising 11,104 unique parcels within a conceptual, 20-level “Hypercastle.” Each parcel, represented as a 32x32 grid of Unicode characters, is fully on-chain, ensuring its permanence and immutability. The parcels feature distinct zones, biomes, chroma (animation speed), and topography (heightmaps), resulting in an evolving landscape that continuously shifts, embodying what the artists call a temporal and generative heartbeat. The work distills in information ecology as artwork, in that the primary “form” of the artwork is the dynamic computational object. The interactive data-object can take on many visual interpretations, and the community has developed new ways of viewing this form, but they’re not privileged over the differential form itself. Difference and information systems becomes the core medium of artistic malleability.

Straylight, another Sympoietic hypersculpture, is a generative multiplayer simulation built entirely on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Described as a work of “onchain maximalism” its computation, state, and visual output is executed entirely via smart contracts. The work is composed of various “Worlds” or simulated grids that combine four different agents, each with its own modifiable ruleset, to produce emergent visual patterns. As the artist writes, “every agent is embedded in an environment with other agents, making the system ultimately nondeterministic, generative, cooperative, and non-teleological” (Siedler 2022). The work is highly formalist and non-conceptual — code as “formalized operationalizable concept.” Straylight is a deep exploration of a protocol as artwork. Programmed rules combined with social interaction create endless permutations.

These Sympoietic artworks gesture to a future in which art is creative participant in information ecologies. As planetary-scale computation accelerates and progressively eats the world, Sympoietic Art becomes an increasingly relevant mode of artistic agency within cybernetic systems.