A short history of leaving things out
A museum of compression in seven rooms. It takes about forty minutes to walk round, and you can leave by any door.
Two parrots, photographed on film and scanned by Kodak in the early 1990s.
The picture is 768 dots across and 512 down. Written out dot by dot it comes to 1.18 MB.
You are now looking at a copy that takes 17.3 kB. It is 68 times smaller.
Hold the button to bring the original back, and see whether you can find what went missing.
Almost nothing reaches you as it was made.
The film you stream tonight is a few thousandths of what the camera recorded. The voice on a telephone call is a sketch of a voice.
There are two ways to make something smaller. You can say the same thing in fewer words, and get every word back.
Or you can decide what nobody will miss, and never say it at all.
The rooms are numbered in the order they make most sense, and every door is open. The corridor between them is a timeline.