Opposite Harmony No.89925 / No.40848, 1990
Information about the artwork
- MaterialSemiconductor board with integrated circuit, LED display, cable, aluminum plate
- Dimensions11 x 26 x 3.5 cm
- Year of acquisition1990
- Inventory numberUAB 291
- On viewOn view
- Copyright© Tatsuo Miyajima, Courtesy Buchmann Galerie
More about the artwork
“Everything is interacted [sic] with each other. Nothing could be independent.” This is how the Japanese sculptor and installation artist Tatsuo Miyajima describes his worldview. Since the late 1980s, he has worked with digital LED counters that continuously cycle through the numbers one to nine. The zero is deliberately omitted, since for Miyajima it represents a Western concept. The endless rhythm reflects Buddhist ideas of impermanence, transformation, and cyclical flow. “Opposite Harmony No.89925 / No.40848” belongs to the 133651 Series, initiated in 1990. Each work consists of ten modular units equipped with numerical LED displays, and each unit, in turn, can send and receive signals from up to five others within the same system. This creates 133,651 possible combinations, each assigned a unique “unit number,” which here also serves as the work’s title. By default, the LEDs glow in the color red, yet the units with numbers that are multiples of seven are displayed in green. In this piece, two such units are mirrored and interconnected. The specific sequence of numbers emerges from their reciprocal communication. For Miyajima, this interplay forms a dialogical network—a state of “harmony.”
