Wed 26 Mar 2008
You know when you read a book, hear a piece of music or see a painting, and you think, “Wow! It’s bottomless. I could look at it forever and still see new things!”
This is one of the most profound experiences I get from art (and sometimes I get it from objects and experiences that aren’t art, as when I look at the ocean).
However, bottomlessness is an illusion. A work of art only has so much information in it. But at some point, it SEEMS like it has infinite information in it. I’m interested in the mechanics of this. How much information — and what sort of information — creates an oceanic feeling?
I have a theory that you don’t really need that much information. I think the human brain sort of goes one… two… three.. four… OH MY GOD! INFINITY!!!
I remember, years ago, seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Nicholas Nicholby.” Near the start, they created the illusion of a busy London street. I remember marveling at it, feeling like they had a million actors on stage, all doing very different things — so many things that I could never take in the whole scene, even if I saw the play a hundred times.
In fact, they had about 25 actors on stage. That’s a relatively large number, but it’s not vast. Still, I couldn’t keep track of them all at once, so my brain just decided that something really profound and “infinite” was going on.
I doubt it’s possible to break this down into an equation, but I do wonder about the minimum amount of information needed to create the illusion of vastness, great depth, the oceanic, the infinite…
Posted by grumblebee
I’m not sure if this is generalizable to other art forms beyond music, but I’d say that feelings of complexity arise from a large and varied set of relations between things, rather than a large set of things themselves. For example, Coltrane’s Giant Steps feels very complex because of the complex harmonic relationships between notes and chords, not because Coltrane plays a lot of notes (the same goes for bebop in general, but Coltrane takes it further than anyone else). Steve Reich’s Clapping Music or any of his Phase pieces are more extreme examples: the complexity of the temporal relationships between notes emerges from the simple patterns.
I think you could say the same thing about language. Shakespeare is great (and complex) because of the way he deals with relationships between words and phrases. Postmodernism explores the relationships between bits of culture.
I do wonder about the minimum amount of information needed to create the illusion of vastness, great depth, the oceanic, the infinite…
Actually you’re quite close - the answer is actually seven (plus or minus two) according to George A. Miller. This is supposedly the number of separate data that we can process at any given time.
I think you’re partly right about the seven (plus or minus two) thing, but there’s more to it. When numbers become two-many-to-grasp, sometimes it just seems like confusion. Other times it evokes the infinite. What’s the extra ingredient(s) that leads to awe?
If we were to stick to the biology/psychology end of the topic (and that’s certainly not the only way to approach this question) then I would say it also has to do with the way our brains are in a way pattern matching machines. So the logical parts of our brain are overloaded with information, but it is still trying to see patterns nonetheless. So it seems like we ‘know’ there is some meaning there but we just can’t process it.