My favorite definition of information comes from Gregory Bateson in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). He wrote that information is “difference that makes a difference.†I find this statement very compelling. I like to play with it, looking around at my physical environment and training my eye on the most subtle differences I can see. It also makes me think about twilight when everything sort of does that flip flop where dark things become light and light things become dark. The mechanisms we have to discern differences are not stable, by any means. Which means that information is far from static.
Bateson’s definition of information was the first thing I thought of when I viewed this video: Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim: The Selby Profiles Deaf Performance Artist Sun Kim’s Sonic Experiment. The title of this post comes from one of the fleeting subtitles in this short film. Thanks to Josh Kitlas for sharing it with me.
Still from "Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim"