Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory
1960 painting in which each of 40,000 grid squares is coloured blue or red according to the parity of digits read aloud from a telephone directory.
Run it
What it looks like when it goes wrong (3)
- Every square now reads one raw digit instead of a whole number, so it also reads straight through the simulated source's repeated leading-prefix digits. The source repeats every 7 digits and the grid is not 7 cells wide, so the repetition lands in a different column each row and shows up as diagonal banding instead of an even mix — the "one square per number" vs. "one square per digit" ambiguity, made visible.
- With the offset at zero the grid starts by reading straight through a deterministic, non-representative run standing in for a directory's front matter, which prints as a distinct patterned band across the first rows instead of dissolving into the same mix as the rest of the grid.
- At this many cells, each square is only a couple of device pixels wide, so individual squares stop being distinguishable and the canvas reads as flat, uniform noise dithering rather than a field of discrete, rule-governed decisions.
Clean-room implementation — written from the described algorithm, not from source. Reuse policy
What it is
Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory is a 1960 painting by François Morellet: a grid of 40,000 squares, each one blue or red, with no brushwork decision left to taste. The colour of every square was settled by a stream of digits somebody else read aloud to him from a telephone directory.
The rule behind it
Morellet’s own account, in the order he describes doing it:
- Rule a grid of 40,000 squares with horizontal and vertical lines.
- Have someone else — “my wife or my sons” — read numbers aloud from a telephone directory, skipping what he calls “the first repetitive digits.”
- For each square, take the next value from that stream. Even: mark the square. Odd: leave it blank.
- Paint every marked square blue, every blank one red — “the crossed squares were painted blue and the blank ones red.”
Step 3 hides an ambiguity Morellet’s account never settles. He says his family read “the numbers” from the directory and that he marked a square “for an even number” — but he never specifies whether one square consumes one whole directory entry or one digit within it. Both readings satisfy the instruction equally well, and nothing in this account chooses between them; anyone implementing the rule has to make that choice for him, and it is not a cosmetic choice — reading a stream one digit at a time versus one whole number at a time are two different rules that happen to share an instruction.
Why it mattered
Morellet returned to the rule after the painting: for the 1963 Paris Biennale he built a 3-D version, shown among the installations of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel — the same decision procedure carried over to a different physical form, not just a one-off painting technique.
Where to see the original
Morellet’s own account of making the piece — the source for everything above — is in Tate Etc., issue 16 (Summer 2009): “65, 38, 21, 4, 72…”.
Connected to
Created by: François Morellet