The Secret Lives of Numbers
_Golan Levin
about Golan Levin
http://www.flong.com
Golan Levin’s work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in a wide variety of online, installation and performance media. He is known for the conception and creation of Dialtones: A Telesymphony [2001], a concert whose sounds are wholly performed through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience's own mobile phones, and for interactive information visualizations like The Secret Lives of Numbers [2002] and The Dumpster [2006], which offer novel perspectives onto millions of online communications. Previously, Levin was granted an Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica for his Audiovisual Environment Suite [2000] interactive software and its accompanying audiovisual performance, Scribble [2000]. Other projects from recent years include Re:MARK [2002], Messa di Voce [2003], and The Manual Input Sessions [2004], developed in collaboration with Zachary Lieberman, and Scrapple [2005] and Ursonography [2005]; these performance and installation works use augmented-reality technologies to create multi-person, real-time visualizations of their participants’ speech and gestures. Levin is now in the preliminary research phase of a new body of work, which centers about interactive robotics, machine vision, and the theme of gaze as a primary new mode for human-machine communication. Presently Levin is Assistant Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University; his work is represented by the bitforms gallery, New York City.
about The Secret Lives of Numbers
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/
The authors conducted an exhaustive empirical study, with the aid of custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques, in order to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect and refract our culture, our minds, and our bodies.
For example, certain numbers, such as 212, 486, 911, 1040, 1492, 1776, 68040, or 90210, occur more frequently than their neighbors because they are used to denominate the phone numbers, tax forms, computer chips, famous dates, or television programs that figure prominently in our culture. Regular periodicities in the data, located at multiples and powers of ten, mirror our cognitive preference for round numbers in our biologically-driven base-10 numbering system. Certain numbers, such as 12345 or 8888, appear to be more popular simply because they are easier to remember.
Humanity's fascination with numbers is ancient and complex. Our present relationship with numbers reveals both a highly developed tool and a highly developed user, working together to measure, create, and predict both ourselves and the world around us. But like every symbiotic couple, the tool we would like to believe is separate from us (and thus objective) is actually an intricate reflection of our thoughts, interests, and capabilities. One intriguing result of this symbiosis is that the numeric system we use to describe patterns, is actually used in a patterned fashion to describe.
We surmise that our dataset is a numeric snapshot of the collective consciousness. Herein we return our analyses to the public in the form of an interactive visualization, whose aim is to provoke awareness of one's own numeric manifestations.
Commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (Feb. 2002)
for its Turbulence web site
Supported by The Greenwall Foundation.