I may not be phrasing this right, but basically how does the information translate from mere electronic impulse to interactive reality? How does the seemingly simple on/off nature of computer code result in such complex things as a high resolution image, audio, this website?
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Encoding.
The binary is useful because boolean logic–which can be expressed through binary inputs and outputs–can be used to perform computation.
But ultimately, somewhere along the line there’s a program that recognizes specific binary inputs as belonging to specific real-world phenomenon. For example, a bitmap font associates a specific binary sequence with a specific image of a letter. Abstracting away all the rest of the computation involved, when you press a key on your keyboard you’re sending a signal to the computer, which associates that signal with an image in a font file somewhere, retrieves that image, and displays it to the screen.
The image itself, high-res or not, is composed of a sequence of pixels, each of which is associated with a binary sequence in memory that the display knows how to read, and which corresponds to the color of the pixel. Higher resolution images just add more pixels per unit of space (though to be pedantic lower-resolution images have the same number of pixels, as determined by your screen, and the computer just uses one value to determine the color of a larger group of pixels on the screen).
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