VIERUNDZWANZIG, ZWEI, ZWEIUNDZWANZIG

Shao Yong, a Chinese philosopher, poet, and cosmologist developed an arrangement of eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams in the 11th century. Six centuries later Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German philosopher, mathematician and jurist used Shao’s arrangement in developing binary arithmetic operations.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, had already explained in May 1696 the idea of a dual system, which consists only of the numbers 0 and 1. In January 1697, he described this connection between mathematical structures and the theological-philosophical interpretation of the world in written form in his letter to Duke Rudolph August, which is known today as the “New Year’s Letter”. Here, Leibniz interpreted his dual number system in terms of creation: from nothing (i.e. zero) and God’s word (i.e. one), the entire world had come into being. On the left edge of the letter page, the binary code developed by Leibniz can be seen in the form of a number pyramid.

Not only Shao Yong linked dual system with Chinese philosophy and worldview, with the Taoism, but also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz saw in the binary code a convincing symbol of the Christian faith.

The binary code includes both: science and religion.

But how does art deal with the dual system?
How does contemporary painting react to binary-coded media?
How to paint with digital tools and how to exhibit a digital painting?

Vierundzwanzig, Zwei, Zweiundzwanzig
Oleksiy Koval, 2022
Full HD — _{Vierundzwanzig, Zwei, Zweiundzwanzig
Oleksiy Koval, 2022
Digital painting, Full HD
Contemporary Art Center Big House, Wuhan 2023
Photo: BigHouse当代艺术中心}

An outstanding element of the painting process is the rhythm in which the realization of a composition takes place. Rhythmic structures generate the painting process as a regulated movement in space and time. The rules of such forming, their sequence and their number can be determined and handled as rhythmical motives. Here the 1 is to be conceived as a basal unity of movement that can be freely chosen.