On 1 June 2026, Eleonora Minna will deliver her Fellow Lecture on the topic of “Ways of Thinking: Art and Information”. The lecture will take place from 4.15 pm to 6.30 pm in the Philosophikum (Domplatz 23, 48143 Münster), room 201.

In today’s debates, terms like technology, digitality, and information are often used almost interchangeably. A closer look, however, shows their differences and relations. The lecture traces the idea of information back to its origins in the mid-twentieth century. It introduces key contributions such as Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information and the concept of entropy, Norbert Wiener’s work on cybernetics, and the notion of “selective information” developed by Donald MacKay, which also influenced the linguist Roman Jakobson.

These ideas are then brought into dialogue with artistic practices from the same period, especially works created for exhibitions that explicitly explored the concept of information. This comparison highlights how artists have played an active role in questioning and reshaping what we mean by information. The lecture concludes by moving from conceptual art to more recent perspectives, introducing Luciano Floridi’s “Philosophy of Information”. In particular, it looks at his idea of “semantic information” and its ethical implications, showing how these themes resonate with questions raised by contemporary art.

Eleonora Minna is an art historian and journalist. She is currently a contract lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Art Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts of Frosinone and Viterbo (Italy), and a PhD candidate in Medium and Mediality at eCampus University (Milan/Novedrate, Italy).