At the beginning of March, an intriguing if slightly mysterious X post came up on my feed. “At Number Research Inc., we are attempting to find and document all* available numbers,” said the post. It invited users to volunteer for the project, which they could do by simply typing a number into a website.
“This is a volunteer-lead research position, where anyone is able to contribute. Simply type a number in, and we’ll check if we’ve got it. If we have, no worries, just try another. If it’s a new number, thank you for your hard work!” the site describes.
[An appendage describes: “*Currently, we are focusing our research on positive integers. Once this has been completed, then we will be able to look into negatives and decimals.” Something that, on first glance, I embarrassingly did not initially catch, will not be possible.]
Being a volunteer researcher can be somewhat frustrating. In my experience, thinking too hard or trying to be too clever (and inputting a number like 100,000 or 10,987,654,321) leads to numbers that have already been found. I’ve found a more fruitful approach is just to keysmash.
I spoke with Lowbie, the artist behind Number Research Inc. Lowbie describes himself as an “artist slash researcher slash archivist, and also, I guess, a vibe coder.” The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
PHONE TIME: Tell me a little bit about Number Research Inc.
LOWBIE: I wish I could remember how I had the idea. I’ve just been at home, and I was about to do one of my work calls where I interview artists. I’ve been unable to make visual art for a little bit because I just can’t find any inspiration in it. But I’ve been enjoying coding.
I was like, “It’d be funny to make something that’s like every number ever.” It’s this infinite project that’s really impossible to complete, which is really fun. I really like that aspect of it, that it’s this endless Sisyphean task.
When I put it out, a lot of people were annoyed because there’s a 10,000 digit cap. We gotta do the first 10,000 digits first, and then we can look at the rest, you know!
PHONE TIME: Did you expect the response that you’ve been getting?
LOWBIE: No, it’s really weird. I definitely think some of the website stuff I work on does want to tailor towards the viral aspects. I think this project wouldn’t be as interesting without that sort of response, because it’s been up like two days and we have a million numbers found [PHONE TIME note: At the time of writing, there have been 3,754,221 numbers found]. But I wasn’t expecting it. Like a week before, I made a ridiculous site called SubBoxd [currently clicking on it leads to a message that it is “temporarily paused”], which is a Letterboxd for YouTube. There was a meme that went viral that was like “Someone should make Letterboxd for YouTube,” and someone said that it’d be funny if I made that. So I did, and it got no response whatsoever.
So you can’t predict how these things will work, but I think Number Research kind of hit a really interesting niche between artists and tech people and statisticians.
PHONE TIME: Do you think people get it? Is there anyone who is just like, “What is this?”
LOWBIE: Yeah, I got some notifications that were like, “What’s the point in this? Because surely it’s infinite, right?” And I’m like, “Well, fucking yeah. Like obviously that’s the point.” So some people don’t get it. But most people seem to be very positive towards it, which I think I’m kind of surprised by.
PHONE TIME: Do you think you’ll go any other directions with it?
LOWBIE: Probably not. I built one for words, which I like, because it’s finite word research. And then once that’s done, I think I’ll be done with this. It was fun.
PHONE TIME: That reminds me a bit of The Library of Babel website created by Jonathan Basile.
Number Research is one of many “conceptual sites” you’ve made. “Record a Moment” is another one I think is kind of fun. [The site lets you click a button to add a recorded moment—which simply consists of the date, time, and time zone—to a list.]
Can you talk a little bit about conceptual sites and how you come up with ideas?
LOWBIE: I made “Record a Moment” a few months back because I was rereading a great book on conceptual art called “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972” by Lucy Lippard. It’s like a brilliant conceptual art piece in itself, a catalog of every single conceptual art piece that was made when the movement was at its height. And in it, there’s a piece by Christopher Cook called “A Book of Instants.” He wrote down random moments in history that already happened and were yet to happen, which I really liked.
I think there’s sort of a discrepancy between engineers, coders, developers and artists. A lot of the sites people call the “fun web,” I really see them in this lineage of conceptual artworks. I don’t know how much these people see them in the conceptual space; I think they just see them as fun websites. But to me, they’re very conceptual, and they’re beautiful.
PHONE TIME: Because you’re vibe coding, do you ever worry your ideas will get taken because of the lower barrier to making things?
LOWBIE: I think that is where the current discourse around taste probably comes in. I mean, someone could have made this website. I don’t know that they would—it feels very conceptually based and works around a bunch of stuff that I’m sort of thinking about.
I also think the way I’ve made it avoids a lot of the sort of tropes of a vibe-coded website: neon glow, rounded edges and whatnot. I think luckily it kind of avoids that, which is good.
I mean, idea is infinite. There’s no way that will ever run out. And I think if people do have ideas they want to front-run, I think that’s fine. I think the competition is fine. The reason I made the word one is because I had multiple people tell me they were going to do it. I was like, “Well, I’ll front-run you guys.”
I don’t think everyone’s gonna jump on it, and I think only actually very interesting ideas are gonna sustain themselves.
PHONE TIME: Where do you want to go next?
LOWBIE: I always get freaked out when I think it’s slightly viral, to be honest. Yeah, I want to chill out. I want to take a little step back from making sites for a minute, go do some painting, go do some visual work.
There’s always more—I think the beauty is about, I have a lot of ideas and I can always eventually make them, and that’s part of the joy and the fun.
such an interesting project and what an inspiring interview