User:Max/rwm/pi500digits
Douglas Coupland, Pi to 500 Digits (2012)
The painting Pi to 500 Digits from Douglas Coupland is a hand drawn QR code on a big scale. Instead of the typical only black ink, used for generic QR codes, Coupland uses various colors for drawing the little square building blocks. ‘but I try not to use green because people don’t like it. Green is for trees.’ The result ist a colorful abstract painting which reminds on modernist paintings (like ones from Piet Mondrian). An important fact is that the colors do not destroy the interactive function as a Quick Response code. When scanned with a QR code reader, the painting reveals the mathematical constant Pi with 500 digits as plain text. Douglas Coupland has more series of hand drawn QR codes: The first one introduced in 2011 with the title Memento Mori (Latin, more or less ‚remember that you have to die‘). Here the paintings have misleading titles like 100 years of Joy. But when you decode the QR code with your phone you are able to read ‚You’ll be dead before I write these words. I tell you, you are going to miss a world of wondrous changes.’ Memento Mori reveals statements about life and death written by the artist. And this brings together two Couplands: the artist who got his start at a Tokyo art school and the novelist and aphorist who wrote the books Generation X and JPod. In the Book JPod he expend 41 pages for reciting the first hundred thousand digits of Pi. I could imagine that his painting Pi to 500 Digits is also referring to his book besides being humoristic by encoding the circle number Pi into a square based painting. It is also interesting that the number Pi as 'embassies of humanity' is sent with radio telescopes into the universe. This because Pi as a natural constant is so basic that it could also be known by other life forms.
When QR codes were very common a few years ago I was also playing with them. They are kind of magical because you can partly control the behavior of a phone with these black brackets. Often they were placed on posters inviting viewers to scan them and then leading the viewer to a specific website. The problem is that you as human being can not read it. So you have no idea what will happen after scanning. I asked myself what could be the most unreasonable what you can do with it and I ended up with a small project, the QR Clock. http://maxwohlleber.de/projects/qrclock/
Pi to 500 Digits
