“The limit is the art”

I was recently listening to the ‘In Our Time‘ podcast from the BBC, this weeks was about Mathematics and Music, I spent the next hour with a headache from number overloud – but it was fascinating.

The reason I’m bringing this up now is because one of the things one of the experts said on the show was that in ancient Rome mathematics was bundled with the arts (art, music, drama, maths) instead of the sciences.

Shortly after this I was wandering around the web and originally through Robin at Cybersoc I found this brilliant little app that creates a graphical representation of your site.

You type in your website address and the java applet generates a colour code representation of your webpage and it looks stunning.

It doesn’t serve any real purpose other than fascination factor but then isn’t that enough? As a piece of art this is wonderful and … real (well as real as a website can be).

UPDATE: I was going to re-write the paragraph above but liked the art line – instead I’m adding this mid page update – I was reading the Digg post on this site and actually realised that it could be used as a web design tool, a quick way of spotting over use of tables, divs etc…

There are so many aspect of this I could go into in more detail – but won’t because it isn’t why I’m writing this post, however I do want to mention that I love the way they’re using Flickr and tagging to showcase the graphs from users sites instead of trying to host them – this is how the social web should be – multiple sites working together instead of one site locking everyone in.

1000 to 1

However this isn’t the point of this post, at the bottom of the graph there is a link to onethousandpaintings.com, an project that directly marries art and numbers.

Basically someone has taken 1000 canvases and painted a number on each – from 1 to 1000.

The person behind the project is a young Swiss artist called Sala. On the sites blog Sala says “I love cool art, and I love this kind of events”.

On the FAQ Sala tells us why the paintings are so special:

One number, one painting – the number is the art is the limit is the price. Each of the one thousand paintings is unique, showing a number between 1 and 1000. This is an experiment of art and mathematics, on the web, the first of its kind.

Which brings us back to the Romans I guess – from mathematics as art in ancient Rome to mathematics as art online?

The project is more than just a few numbers written on a bit of canvas, the whole concept of the price changing based on the number sold adds a brilliant competitive edge, it gives the numbers and community around them a real sense of life.

You type a number into the box and as well as telling you how much that number costs (there is a discount on the cost of the painting that reduces by 10% for every 100 sold) and a little bit of information on that number from the Wikipedia – again adding in that community element.

I won’t be buying a painting – mainly because the pain my wife would unleash would make it impossible for me to enjoy it – she doesn’t get the concept of buying art for its symbolism, to her it would be a number on a piece of paper.

This would lead to her getting a piece of paper and a pen, writing a number and then demanding I give her money – not quite getting the point but it would be a funny conversation.

However if you don’t have the threat of argument waiting at the other end of the delivery then I suggest you think hard about getting yourself a number, this project has the potential to go down in history as another great moment in the internet evolution.

The last solo web concept that showed this much brilliance through its pure simplicity was the original million dollar homepage – it had a limited initial life (sell 1 million pixels and its full) but sparked a real cry of wonder in the public consciousness.

The project launched in February and Sala has sold nearly 100 numbers so far – all it takes is for a major news agency (say the BBC) to write a piece on it and they will all be gone in no time.