Following the Michael Brewster acoustic installation/sculpture experience (more about that later), we got into a conversation about information and substance. I said that there is an overwhelming amount of information being thrown at us nowadays. He said “But the information is really thin.”

I’d never thought about that.

It seems there is this human compulsion (I wouldn’t call it a need) to divide stuff up into ever smaller bits, and then look at each bit in isolation. Sometimes this is a valuable tool, like when you’re faced with a situation (or situations) the sum of which seems insurmountably huge. Breaking it up into bite sized chunks and then achieving those individually gives a sense of incremental accomplishment that you don’t get when tackling the whole, and sometimes that quantifiable progress is necessary just so you don’t give up.

But we take this too far when it comes to things like information.

The truth is there’s probably not any more information than there ever was. It’s just that we’ve broken it down into such tiny little bits that there are far far far more pieces of information.

In the case of information, this micro approach isn’t such a good thing. Often times those little bits of information are meaningless until assembled into a larger whole.

This is an image:

It’s 650 x 427 pixels in size, which means a total of 277,550 individual pixels. As it stands, that’s a pretty small image — smaller than it looks. The internet is all about compression, which basically means taking something and removing substantial amounts of information from it, and then reassembling it out of what’s left, creating the illusion of substance by making up what isn’t there, sort of like George Bush did with weapons of mass destruction and the war on Iraq. Compression is big business.

If I break it down into 277,550 individual pixels, I’m left with 277,550 bits of individually meaningless information. Even if I break ‘em down into 6 pixel increments, my individual bits of information are meaningless on their own. Try extrapolating that photo from this 6 pixel bit:

Sometimes, though, you can get some pretty amazing results by breaking something down into tiny parts and then reassembling those parts into something altogether different than its source. Here are a handful of video stills. These are from a 10 minute-or-so-long clip I shot pointing the camera out the car window while driving down PCH in the “city” part of Malibu. The video is kind of abstract — cars, buildings, people randomly interrupt the view more often than the view of the ocean can actually be seen, and they’re blurred ’cause I’m driving by at 50 mph.

Video shoots 30 frames per second, with means something like 18,000 frames exist on that clip, and I’ve isolated 40 or so individual frames that looked cool to me. Here are 12 of ‘em, 12 semi random 1/30-of-a-second-in-time moments, combining to make up just over 1/3 of a second of real time (and, maybe, 100 feet max of real distance) pieced together from 10 minutes in time and 8 miles of actual road.