Say It Again

The mathematical concept known as "redundancy" can be applied to virtually any form of communication. In a transcript released last week, members of the Association of the Princeton Graduate Alumni recorded some thoughts on how far it could be pushed into the consideration of art.

"Redundancy," as devised by Mathematician Claude E. Shannon and others, is an evaluation of the effectiveness of the varied forms of communication--e.g., telegraphy, speech, art, music, semaphore, television--in terms of the idea that a certain percentage of symbols in a message does not convey information but merely combats "noise." Noise is sometimes defined as anything from the static of a radio message to a wall of fear, prejudice or misinformation existing in the mind of the listener.

As redundancy increases, according to the theory, so does clarity, up to a point. Yale Electrical Engineering Professor W. J. Cunningham figures that most written and spoken English exhibits some 50% redundancy. If half of the letters were struck out, the message could still get through despite interfering noise. Two extremes of redundancy in English, according to Shannon, are Basic English, whose vocabulary of 850 words makes its redundancy far too high, and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which has such low redundancy (owing to the author's coinage of new words) that it is unintelligible to the average reader. In television, says Cunningham, redundancy is exceptionally high, varying from 95% to 98%--i.e., only 2% to 5% of the signal is actually useful in producing the picture received.

To engineers, the redundancy theory suggests a new way to approach the criticism of art forms. Professor Cunningham believes, for instance, that landscape paintings exhibit the same high redundancy that television pictures do. Williams College Art Professor S. Lane Faison Jr. cautioned, however, that the very best art exhibited the least redundancy, e.g., the paintings of French Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne, who evolved a style that was a. kind of shorthand. In Cezanne's paintings, said Faison, "whole areas of information" were eliminated: "tables, fruit . . . where the light came from, what time of day it is." Redundancy in painting, added Faison, is the very thing that Cezanne was opposing.

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