Distortions — Chaotic forces disarranging orderly structures and uncovering new beauty in them. Media.Work Studio's new research experiments with shapes and patterns appearing from aberrations and imperfections. This story is inspired by graphic design, sculpture, and data visualizations, finding ways to capture meanings that result from serendipitous combinations of parts.

In a world that gets more documented and digitized, data becomes a valuable resource. Searching for objectiveness, the studio yearns to find reliable principles that would inform our decisions. Data seems to be the perfect source of this external wisdom, extracted directly from the world as it is, and so it becomes the foundation for our digital society. Aside from the question of interpretation, information itself may be corrupted, be it by accidental loss or by excessive noise that hinders the extraction of useful bits. To make information exchange more effective and accurate, they planned modern storage and networks of information theory, a field combining knowledge from mathematics, physics, and computer science.

The theory includes several important concepts, one of the most basic ones being information entropy. The term borrowed from thermodynamics indicates how much unpredictability and chaos exist in a system. And it's used to encode and decode a message based on how often certain symbols might occur. Distortions' overall result is stunning animations that remind us of tsunamis but in a beautiful way :)

Additional credits Creative Direction: Maxim Zhestkov, Igor Sordokhonov Design, Animation: Artur Gadzhiev, Denis Semenov, Roman Eltsov, Roman Kuzminykh, Sergey Shurupov, Tatyana Balyberdina, Kirill Makhin, Daniil Makhin Edit: Roman Kotov Sound: Artyom Markaryan Writing: Anna Gulyaeva