Claude Shannon, the American engineer and mathematician who founded modern information theory in 1948, proposed that information could be measured and quantified in terms of uncertainty, independently of the meaning of the message. The core idea is deceptively simple: the more unexpected a message is, the more information it carries. This group of students took this abstract proposition and transformed it into a three-part immersive exhibition, designed to make visitors feel the concepts of entropy, noise and signal not as mathematical formulas, but as lived physical experiences.
|
|
|
The exhibition was structured as a linear journey through three consecutive spaces, each embodying a distinct state of Shannon's model. The design followed the Bauhaus principles of minimalism and functional clarity, with simple geometric forms and a colour-coded scénographie: red for order, blue for chaos, yellow for equilibrium.
The first space demonstrated zero entropy. Screens repeated identical symbols in a fixed loop, a regular bip sounded like a metronome, and strictly symmetrical Bauhaus geometric patterns covered the walls. Visitors were invited to draw from a container filled exclusively with red pieces of paper, the outcome being entirely predictable before the draw was even made. The deliberate intention of this stand was to produce boredom, the uncomfortable realisation that when everything is foreseeable, nothing is being communicated.
The second space produced the opposite effect. Upon entering, visitors were met with overlapping sounds, static, saturated voices and a glitched video playing on a screen, its images fragmenting, trembling and disappearing before reappearing in distorted form. A headset invited visitors to listen for a hidden message buried within the noise: "Le désordre cache parfois un sens." Most visitors could only distinguish a few words, and the average difficulty rating collected via a Google Forms questionnaire was 3.7 out of 5. Roughly a third of participants described the experience as enveloping or immersive, while others found it aggressive or frustrating. Notably, curiosity and the desire to keep searching was reported as frequently as frustration, suggesting that chaos, while disorienting, also functions as a stimulus. Nearly 78% of respondents confirmed that the experience illustrated the concept displayed on the explanatory panel, even without having decoded the audio message in full.
The first space demonstrated zero entropy. Screens repeated identical symbols in a fixed loop, a regular bip sounded like a metronome, and strictly symmetrical Bauhaus geometric patterns covered the walls. Visitors were invited to draw from a container filled exclusively with red pieces of paper, the outcome being entirely predictable before the draw was even made. The deliberate intention of this stand was to produce boredom, the uncomfortable realisation that when everything is foreseeable, nothing is being communicated.
The second space produced the opposite effect. Upon entering, visitors were met with overlapping sounds, static, saturated voices and a glitched video playing on a screen, its images fragmenting, trembling and disappearing before reappearing in distorted form. A headset invited visitors to listen for a hidden message buried within the noise: "Le désordre cache parfois un sens." Most visitors could only distinguish a few words, and the average difficulty rating collected via a Google Forms questionnaire was 3.7 out of 5. Roughly a third of participants described the experience as enveloping or immersive, while others found it aggressive or frustrating. Notably, curiosity and the desire to keep searching was reported as frequently as frustration, suggesting that chaos, while disorienting, also functions as a stimulus. Nearly 78% of respondents confirmed that the experience illustrated the concept displayed on the explanatory panel, even without having decoded the audio message in full.
|
The third and final space offered resolution. A screen displayed semi-random poetic messages, structured enough to be legible but varied enough to remain surprising. Beethoven's Für Elise played in a calm, subtly shifting arrangement, supporting the visual content without overwhelming it. The messages that appeared on screen, such as "Ce qui surprend éclaire" and "Un détail imprévu change tout," illustrated the principle the students had set out to demonstrate: that optimal information emerges not from perfect order, nor from total chaos, but from the precise tension between the two.
In the end, the students conveyed through this project that Shannon's theory, though dating from 1948, remains entirely applicable to the contemporary world. In a media environment saturated with content, only the surprising message retains genuine informational value. Communicating, as one of the students put it, is always a struggle against natural entropy, a fight to impose meaning that is no less relevant today than it was at the origins of information science. |
