Michelangelo: 'I merely removed everything that was not David.' The anecdote is probably apocryphal. The method is not. Direct carving works by subtraction, each chisel strike eliminates a possible state of the block. The form emerges through the elimination of the forms that are not it.
The process has a property that addition does not: it is irreversible. The removed marble does not return. Each strike permanently reduces the space of possibilities. The information contained in the final statue is not in what it is, it is in everything it no longer is. The block contained every statue. This one is the only one that survived the subtraction.
Doctrine
Addition increases possibilities. Subtraction settles them. Information is not in what is added. It is in what is permanently removed.
Vecteur ouvert
Landauer showed that erasing a bit dissipates heat, erasure has a physical cost. If subtraction produces information and produced information dissipates energy, is sculpture a thermodynamic process whose waste product is form?
