“Nineteen Eighty-Four,” is an interactive display that shows house address numbers extracted from Google Street View images. The numbers have an immense variety of fonts, colors, textures and styles, as they were scanned by Google from the front doors of buildings from all over the World. The display writes over 22 billion different combinations of the number 1984; these combinations change automatically at a speed that can be set using a dial, from one different image every ten seconds to ten images per second. At the default speed, it will take around 1,000 years for the same combination of images to be repeated. Typing any number onto an onboard animated keyboard starts a fast count-down or count-up until eventually the number 1984 is reached. At that point, the display resumes cycling through different combinations of images to make variations on 1984.

About the Artist

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989 he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. He has had solo exhibitions in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the MUAC Museum in Mexico City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Rafael was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale. He has received two BAFTA British Academy Awards for Interactive Art in London, a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica in Austria, the “Artist of the year” Rave Award from Wired Magazine, and a Rockefeller fellowship.