New Informationist Culture Initiative

IIMx as an organisation and research community is interested in the impact of information theory and the science of information on scientific practice. The impact of the information age and the information science and technologies that accompany it have also resulted in various forms of informationism. In philosophical terms, informationism is generally:

1. Commitment to the idea that the world is fundamentally comprised of, supervenes upon, or reduces to, information of some kind ^[2][3][4][5].
2. Commitment to the truth of one or another form of informational ontology or informational metaphysics ^[6][7][8][9]. (Source: wiktionary.com)

The impact of infomationism on culture, art, and politics is just as fascinating and relevant as its impact on the sciences. It can be expressed as a form of scientism, or as part of a scientistic worldview, or it can be absorbed and reflected by cultural and literary texts and tropes that govern everyday people's perception of themselves and their societies. Well known cultural idioms and literary tropes such as 'Big Brother', 'The Matrix', and 'The Ghost in the Machine' all exemplify the development of informationist culture and cultural awareness.

The Informationism and Informationist Culture research initiative focuses upon the informationist nexus of culture, science, and art. Perhaps the best way to explain this is, simply, to provide one of the most important examples from popular scientific literature in the last half century:

On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air…It is raining instructions…it‘s raining programs; it‘s raining tree growing, fluff-spreading algorithms. This is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth.  - Dawkins, R. The Blind Watchmaker. London: Folio Press, 2007.