Read at Mr Yancy's Class Room inside the museum · the same label the museum panel shows, from content/inception/museum-labels/mr-yancy-wall-2.html

Mr Yancy's Class Room · Wall 02

From Bits to Meaning

A bit is the smallest possible answer: one of two choices, written 0 or 1 — like a light switch that is either off or on. This artwork follows those tiny choices as they team up into numbers, letters, pictures, sound, and movement.

Watch the symbols gather

A still from the Live Painting: falling green zeros and ones gather above a pixel-built Nativity scene, with the labels pixels to image and bits to color.
The falling symbols are not only decoration. They begin as separate states, form ordered groups, and are interpreted as the values needed to build a recognizable image.

One short decoding example

The bit pattern 01000001 becomes binary number 65 and then ASCII letter A; nearby cards show that bits may instead describe color, sound, position, or an instruction.
Where a bit sits decides how much it counts for. The pattern 01000001 adds up to the number 65 — and by a rule everyone agreed on, called ASCII, 65 stands for the letter A. With a different agreed rule, the exact same 0s and 1s could mean something else entirely.

The rule completes the message

Numbers do not tell you what they are for. The same group of bits could be how bright a dot is, one tiny slice of a sound, a spot on a map, a moment in time, or a command for the computer. The pattern never changes — only its job does.

A scientist named Claude Shannon showed that you can study information itself, no matter what message happens to carry it — the way you can study boxes without caring what is inside. This artwork starts from his big idea: meaning comes from how things are arranged, plus a rule everyone agrees on for reading them.

Two symbols can support many different worlds because we can create different rules for reading them.