The dream of the information world

In the late 1960s, artists world-wide turned to language and its related forms to devise a stylistic that would democratize artistic production. This essay examines the. deeper structure of belief that catalysed this 'conceptual" aesthetic. Concurrently, structuralists argued that all human endeavours were inescapably governed by language's grid-like order, and that sociality could be mastered through a 'science' of the signifier. Like artists, they looked to languaue for a revolution in signifying structures. Aesthetically and theoretically speaking, language had become the grid through which the world was pictured. This essay argues that we not only need to recover structuralism in order to truly understand Conceptualist aspirations and stratagems, we also need to reconsider this aesthetic for what it has to teach us about the fantasies that produced structuralism's ideals, the politics that grew up with those ideals, and, Surprisingly, the technological imaginary of its day. The word 'information' emerges as the nodal point of this constellation. Through a close reading of MoMA's Information show (1970), this essay reveals that far from embracing the dream of the information world - a dream of the world as a total sign system, 'revolutionary' perhaps, yet alienating of Subject and world - the visual arts expose its limitations.