237.231 Studio Session Notes (as a single page)

Topic for first 6 week block: Information.

Definitions of information

Intangible things that can be collected to represent something.

The brief

Choose an information form. Where did it come from? How did it change, or how has it remained the same?

8-12 different investigations of an information format or behavious

select 2 or more and deveelop a

https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/foundations-of-information/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital

Main topic: Simulation

Loss of Information

It’s all a matter of scale. One theoretical end for the universe is “heat death” – where entropy will reach a maximum. If that’s the case, then according to Shannon’s definition of information (as a measurable reduction in entropy), then the amount of information must be tending towards zero. So, yes, information is being lost.

Access to information

Not sure why T raised the middle class in the context of access to information? Early communists strongly believed in literacy and giving information to the proletariat. To “destroy privileged right to knowledge”.

“When there came […] the October Revolution, the peasantry and the proletariat came forward without any skill in government, being as far removed from this as can be imagined. Now the power of the state has but one task: to give the people, as quickly as possible, the greatest possible amount of knowledge, to cope with the gigantic role which the Revolution has prepared for the people – to destroy the privileged right to knowledge, allowed before to only a small part of society …”

– Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet Commissar for Education and Enlightenment, spoke at the All-Russia Congress on Education

Brown, Martin. Is There a Marxist Perspective on Education?https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/culture/education/item/2819-is-there-a-marxist-perspective-on-education. Accessed 17 Aug. 2022.

Assignment Outline

Environmental costs of information

Intro – History of books (hand written, the printed), ebooks.

Carbon and other environmental costs.

What am I going to make/construct? An information product?

In class exercises

This week was a rare face-to-face class – a pleasant change from Zoomiversity.

We did a variety of exercises:

Come up with as many different way to say “pass the salt” as possible,.

Provide three other words for crumbly, billowy, angular, fluffy.

Provide three entirely made up words for the same.

Take a coloured piece of paper and define it in various ways (scent, taste, texture, etc.). Repeat this with a new colour.

Then, finally, combine all of the words and phrases into some kind of piece of poetry, prose, etc.

Final piece

Look at the salt,
Look at the other person,
Make eye contact.

Reach out.

Pointy, bitty, downy.
Feel the cold, metallic cellar in your mind's eye.
Steel blue.

The peppermint hard metal.
Sharp at the edges.
Kachick, chit, ittat.

Relax.

Think instead of the warm hillside and the birds quietly chirping.

Mossy clouds.
Relaxed and cottony.

Classroom raw notes