I’ve been searching for this quote forever. Browsing through old syllabi I find it, somewhere in the text ‘Art as language’ by Yury Lotman – very heavily underlined annotated by myself, but not this sentence:

Art is the most economical, compact method for storing and transmitting information. But art also has other properties wholly worthy of the attention of cyberneticians and perhaps, in time, of design engineers.

[I guess, with design engineers Lotman refers to what we now know as ‘programmers’].

My annotation – dating from around 1988 – “ONZIN” (=nonsense).

Yury Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, Ann Arbor, 1977, (1970), p. 23