Picture Book Edition - The Idea
You can find a lot of attempts to represent Pi digits in an artistic way for the last few years. One of these attempts was our MAGIC PIWORLD project (HAEL YGGS&JVS 1998) where we built a computer tool for executing digit-colour and digit-geometrical transformations. Using this tool HAEL YGGS created several artistic objects (see HAEL YGGS site for details).
The basic representation of MAGIC PIWORLD was the so-called SQUARE WORLD where we have a M x N - Matrix and the shade of every square stands for 1 digit. Scaling the square down to 1 pixel we can see more than 1.000.000 digits on the screen at a glance.
But alas! All this is virtual!
We want to hold real PI things in our hands.
In spring 2000, I persuaded my mother CHRISTA SCHMIDT to crochet a PI-carpet from a SQUARE WORLD pattern. And one year later this marvellous carpet was shown at the ZIRKUMFERENZ exhibition. The carpet (3.14m x 3.14m) represent the first 2.500 decimal dgits of PI.
CHRISTA SCHMIDT - Pi Carpet
(Photo: Amira Fritz)
The FRIENDS OF PI took an active part in the exhibition. HAEL YGGS showed MAGIC PIWORLD generated Scotch prints on glass that represented some hundred thousands of PI digits. And Albert McWasi printed THE PIBEL containing 10.000.000 PI digits.
ALBERT MCWASI - PIBEL
After the ZIRKUMFERENZ my studies reached the outstanding book "PI - COMPUTER, ALGORITHMEN, ARITHMETIK" by Joerg Arndt and Christoph Haenel. The book includes a CD with 400.000.000 PI digits from the YASUMASA-KANADA-LABS. And this was the moment I decided to create an object that should be based on this data: THE PICTURE BOOK.
