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M+, Hong Kong, © Siah Armajani
Siah Armajani 西亞．阿馬賈尼
A Number Between Zero and One 零和一之間的數字
1969
A Number Between Zero and One is a sculpture by Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani, consisting of a stack of paper printouts of an imaginary number—10^-205,714,079—one requiring 25,974 sheets and twenty-eight hours to print. The nearly three-metre-tall column of paper, held in place by a steel frame, transforms the nature of paper from a two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional form. The sculpture is influenced by conceptualism, a movement that often creates a distance between the artist and the artwork through fabrication or defined instructions and rules. An early example of an artist rethinking how computer procedures might alter their production, Armajani’s work was an important inclusion in the landmark 1970 exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Armajani’s early work deals with issues of text, language, and calligraphy, and the ways words become images. Here, he identifies the sheet of paper as a critical site for carrying information in society, including legal contracts, political instruments, corporate reports, and personal documents. Binary code, the basic language of computers, transforms everything into patterns of zeros and ones which translate actions as yes/no or on/off settings. By printing the seemingly endless number, an absurd act in which a small number produces a large object, the artist comments on the impossibility of data to fully represent daily life. The encasement of the paper reinforces data’s inaccessibility.
Armajani’s early work deals with issues of text, language, and calligraphy, and the ways words become images. Here, he identifies the sheet of paper as a critical site for carrying information in society, including legal contracts, political instruments, corporate reports, and personal documents. Binary code, the basic language of computers, transforms everything into patterns of zeros and ones which translate actions as yes/no or on/off settings. By printing the seemingly endless number, an absurd act in which a small number produces a large object, the artist comments on the impossibility of data to fully represent daily life. The encasement of the paper reinforces data’s inaccessibility.
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