The proliferation of information is antithetical to knowledge. 500 video-hours are uploaded to Youtube every minute. Who could consume it all, let alone digest it. Beyond the personal scale, additional information not only fails to clarify, but actively obscures. Youtube hours are an easy-to-quantify example. What if you wanted more?

You might object, “what about the algorithms?” Notwithstanding whether data analyses truly reach their objects, is there not a multiplicative problem? The algorithms themselves produce even more information. Do algorithms need algorithms? A bigger drill and a hotter smelter. If you manage to refine the information to a human scale, the object has changed completely.

It’s not easy to find all the paintings of red hats grouped nicely together. Some red hats are very important, important enough to find their way into titles. Most don’t get mentioned anywhere. And why would they be? It’s obvious when actually looking at a painting what color the hats are. It could only become relevant if someone were trying to biopsy a tiny cross-section from the appendix of history. Who would bother?

The information the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia deemed to be important adds up to 10,800 trial days, and millions of pages of dense court documents. Who can know how much more was discarded as irrelevant. The court distills these data to a simple binary: guilty or not guilty. How far we are from the truth of the event!

Painting is a meditation on the vast gulf between the productive capacity of an individual’s time and true knowledge, one possible failure-mode among many. One might be better off not trying at all. I make no conclusions, no condemnations or affirmations, just some crystalized moments.