Overquantified
Wouter Pollaris
Antwerp
About
Antwerp based graphic designer.
Project
Overquantified is a personal visual system to question and show the processing of huge quantities. This started as a journey to draw out all 256 possible possibilities of a grid, originally created to research a typographic system. Along the way, the grid expanded and the possible possibilities grew to be 268.435.456. This seemingly simple number turned out to be a challenge to visually process and show to an audience. For example, this quantity in seconds intuitively feels like weeks or months, whereas in reality this is 8 years. Using simple math the possibilities were easy to calculate, but through coding, the computer struggled to process the output of the 268 million possibilities. This made me wonder how much 268.435.456 really is, and why we underestimate such quantities. How do we understand all the quantities around us in the natural, human, biological, digital and technological space?