In a text, we can easily distinguish “noise” from “information.” In a painting, one day’s “noise” is the next day’s “information.”
Dave Hickey
Robert Procter, painting in progressIt’s hard to distinguish between “noise” and “information” in the first place. It took watching a confidently-made movie for me to recognize that I’d been watching television that was made anxiously.
Practice: Study a phenomenon. Any phenomenon. You making a sandwich, you selecting a vacation destination. Identify anything you consider noise: searching for the mustard, reading about alternate vacation spots.
Advanced practice: Revisit the categories the next day. Or the next week. If you have decided to take up making your own mustard, reclassify your earlier search for mustard as information. You kept looking, an apparently useless activity (noise) because the mustard you wanted wasn’t there (information).
Related practices: Boredom, Fresh Peaches, First Step