Levels of Encoding
Have you ever seen one of those powers of 10 explanations that zoom out by powers of 10, then zoom in by powers of ten? If so, hold that visual.
I want to show all the layers of encoding and then decoding that occur when something simple and digital happens. An email, or, a keystroke sent in a chat, or an X-10 camera showing a gallery patron walking in. The *thing* is not as important as being able to show all the significantly different layers. I don’t even know them all, but, I know they are myriad. I hit a key, and it’s an electrical signal that gets converted many times before it even displays on my screen. Now send it over a simple network and think of all the transforms that are happening to get different parts of the network to handle it. I want the finest level of granularity that is possible/practical/interesting. Down to binary if possible. Realtime if possible. Imagine being able to type in an arbitrary text at a terminal in a gallery and then seeing on 57 different screens each discrete step involved in IMing it to another computer at the end of the exhibit. The original text shows up colored so that when it’s encoded it’s still discernible from the parts that are its envelopes, maybe.