Expansion artifacts

The information age has been defined by bandwidth. The internet is limited by how much data we can squeeze into the narrow pipes of transmission infrastructure. So we invented compression , ways of representing the same object — a website, a picture, a song, a movie — within ever smaller digital footprints. YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, and the algorithms that make them work, wouldn’t be possible without it. From the very first studies into compression (at Bell Labs in the 1940s), researchers knew they’d hav