This find (thanks Dharmang) describes a history and accounting of the Transactional Arts–which is art, where a transaction is explicitly part of the work.

Daniela Plewe’s discussion brings me back to some thoughts and notes I made about Marcel Duchamp’s Coefficient d’Art. Duchamp described it as:

“An arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”

It is intended to describe the difference between what artists intend and what the spectator perceives.  For Duchamp, this difference is in the act of communication or transaction, where certain differences and attributions of value are made out of the interaction among individuals.  It this coefficient that structures the viewers engagement with artifacts and allows them opportunities to appropriate objects to their own needs and ends.

For Duchamp, the coefficient of art could be good (+), bad (-) or indifferent (=), but the sign of the coefficient had no bearing on the effectiveness of the work itself–only the difference between the agency of the artists to produce a desired effect in the minds of the spectators.  The effect itself is up for further negotiation between them.

Mutual information is a similar concept to the coefficient of art, but it comes from information theory and describes the amount of information one thing tells about another thing. In other words, it is the reduction in uncertainty of one thing due to knowledge of another. If we ask how information (and consequently, meaning) is shared between different sources of uncertainty (like an object and a spectator or an object and its artist), we may be able to get a sense of how they are connected and how they might respond to each other.

Mutual information is helpful as a concept because we want to understand how interactions vary with one another–i.e. how interaction values may/may not change as a result of signals, actions, and assumptions.

A component of mutual information is information entropy. Entropy is a measure of uncertainty associated with a variable and quantifies the information contained in a message.  It is similar to the coefficient of art; it may describe the uncertainty associated with an artwork as judged by the spectator.  Conversely, it could describe the absence of meaning when one does not know the value of the work.  Likewise the spectator may themselves exhibit high entropy (high uncertainty) relative to the artist if the artist knows little about the spectator and how they will perceive the artwork….at least that’s how I think it would go.

The coefficient of art is a compelling concept.  It suggests that that art has an effect, and if an effect–value in context.  Describing that value is very close to the describing what difference the work of art makes, either to the spectator or some chain extending through them.

Borrowing from evolutionary and network theory, one could pull in a set of relationships between interacting agents that describe how networks evolve and persist. Relationships endure over time from the benefits of interaction. In network reciprocity, entities pay a cost, c, while their number of neighbors, k, receive a benefit, b. If b/c > k, where the ratio of benefits to costs is greater than the sum of neighbors, the network persists because its members are gaining as a result of their interactions.

Duchamp’s coefficient of art (hereafter described using the greek letter psi, ϕ; see also: epistasis), approximates the number of neighbors, but as indicated by it separation from the actual effect of the work itself, says nothing about costs and benefits. ϕ approximates k, or rather the reciprocal of k, because as the number of neighbors (or spectators of the work) increases, the likely ability of the artwork to communicate intent, decreases. This is because of variation among the spectators who may either not be well-understood by the artist or who are perceiving differently or because the artist. Interestingly, ϕ always assumes artistic intent. If ϕ is low, it may be the ‘fault’ of the spectator, the inability of the artist to realize that intent, or of some other intervening factor.

But what about art that is created beyond intent such as generative, algorithmic, or emergent artworks?

ϕ may also be a bound on the ability of artifacts to bridge social groups, as in the case of boundary objects that have multiple uses. The intent of the maker of that object is only partially achieved, but may clearly be appropriated to serve other purposes. Here we might similarly invoke a coefficient of use–or a measure of intent in use that transforms the intent of the artist.

Far from achieving certainty, at least the idea of ϕ, of a coefficient of art, starts to unlock more questions about translation and meaning between objects and people–and of the directionality of interactions between people.