Nicholas Tresilian on the Ecology as a Lens on the World

In commentary to this brief video, Nicholas Tresilian adds: “Claude Shannon’s capacity theorem is also enormously helpful in helping us understand how classical paintings work. I’ve said elsewhere in my work that an attractor functions by combing in positive and negative entropy flows in the same image so true two flows balance out to zero and the image functions as an attractor, it binds upon itself. But classical painting starts with an image which apparently distributes meaning. How do we get both an attractor and distributor in the same image: the answer seems to be by overloading the image - cramming the surface of the painting or sculpture with more information than the eye actually has capacity to assimilate - thereby causing the idealised representation of reality (the pure signal) to be experienced subliminally as a combination of signal and noise, the noise representing the informational overload in relation to the natural capacity of the eye. However this is not a simple mechanistic operation. The art consists in bringing into equilibrium the signal and the noise - and for that an enormous psychological agility and judgement is required… The genius of the artist consists in establishing this intuitive equilibrium of liminal signal and subliminal noise.”

[ayaritudor-jones]

I’m no engineer, but after listening twice I understand this and it makes sense. I’d like to know what people with a fuller understanding think.