e+
Installation.
Done: summer 2004.
Part of the rand()%lab exhibition.
Medialounge, The Media Centre, Huddersfield, UK, 04.11.04 - 07.01.05.

e+ is a small and slightly obfuscated script that runs from a Unix shell and generates an endless pseudo-random number with slightly different color output depending on the time of the day. Because endless is a bit too much for us humans, we decided to reset it every day, to add some extra excitement. The counter increments every second, which means that after a few hours running, the sequence was easily over 10.000 digits long (and growing). Thus, the title, e+ is a reference to the exponential abbreviation on calculators.
Because numbers have a personality too, every hour the program checked for any occurrences of popular numbers (666, 007, 13 etc.) in the generated string, and displayed some statistics. On top of that, e+ kept a log of the number it generated, and sent that as a text file to a server, so that users / visitors could download the generated numbers every day for personal use (a 40.000 digit random number always comes in handy).

Once the exhibition finished, we ran e+ for the last time until it generated a 1.000.000 digit pseudorandom number, available for download as a 267 page txt file.

Live beamer version at Ultrasound festival: