About countune - Ideas and Origines

If you want to do something great, do it with friends and send a message of peace.

Why should a picture always belong to just one person? This picture belongs to everyone, so it brings people and ideas together in freedom, truth and love.

countune is an "International Internet Social Art Project" and a registered Trademark. It is a new concept for exhibiting pictoral art. Its significance is rooted in an on-going graphic representation of the sequence of natural numbers.

countune is the inevitable consequence of Gerd Jansens course of methodical development as an artist, his experience with the public and his involvement with the natural numbers series made it more than clear to him that he wanted to extract a coherent working concept from all this.

countune demonstrates a structural form inherent in the sequence of numbers. In this regard, it is possible to speculate that numbers could be constituent criteria of our universe.

countune is in fact again based on the sequence of natural numbers, although in the process of creating pictures it makes use of one further precept. All the resulting pictures become progressively interrelated and so help to form a community of owners too who can all be found somewhere along the number line with their own "plot of numbers".

countune's idea is, to give the viewer his or her own range of numbers so that each picture contains the individual's own, quite specific freedom of choice; in this way, a barrier to them is lifted. At "create YOUR free countune" on this site, the viewer can decide the quantity of numbers (the length of the picture) and the colors for his picture.

countune is a combination of two verbs, "to count" and "to tune", and thus signifies the fusion of an horizontal and vertical movement, to some extent comparable to the melody of a song. This movement is the result of the constant repetition of a single entity based in principle on a number line with a perpendicular wave. The arbitrary distribution of prime numbers gives the resulting area its structure.

countune-example 897 - 921, 25 numbers

The gray and brown stripes on the background show the even distribution of prime numbers within the counting process (the example illustrates the numbers 897 - 921, a picture with 25 numbers). The similarly even wave (shown here as a white line) rises to over one hunderd numbers and then to a further hunderd she descends, and so on. Through the use of prime numbers, the inside of the area covered shiftsfrom being below to above the wave and vice versa.

Give countune a reality and how to download countunes

countunes Graphic Photo overview
Examples - left side: Graphics & right side: Photos (click on the image to enlarge)


For more ideas have a look at countunes Gallery

Downloads are free and don't need login

There are 16-, 25-, 36-, 49-, 64- and 81-number-countunes and every one is available in both Graphic and Photo PDF-Formats (you can find below each countune in the little text areas). To download, simply click on the words for the version you would like. You can print out the files in original size at a copy shop that has the appropriate equipment. There are many ways in which you can present and apply countune images.

Here examples for each of the 6 Graphic and Photo proportions:

16 numbers: PDF-Graphic 40 x 40 cm PDF-Photo 32 x 20 cm
25 numbers: PDF-Graphic 40 x 40 cm PDF-Photo 50 x 20 cm
36 numbers: PDF-Graphic 50 x 40 cm PDF-Photo 72 x 20 cm
49 numbers: PDF-Graphic 60 x 40 cm PDF-Photo 98 x 20 cm
64 numbers: PDF-Graphic 80 x 40 cm PDF-Photo 128 x 20 cm
81 numbers: PDF-Graphic 100 x 40 cm PDF-Photo 162 x 20 cm

Gerd Jansen - The founder of countune

countune-founder Gerd Jansen
Gerd Jansen, 2010

Gerd Jansen has been basing sculptures on simple number systematics for many years. A realisation of the resources found in the structures of the natural numbers has greatly enhanced his expressive potential. Patterns are formed by dividing up the grid space of the framework and through use of the distribution of prime numbers in certain areas. This ensures the desired degree of objectivity and consequently the artist’s relationship with his entire output. Subjectivity is found in the choice of material, colour, transparency, proportion and dimension.

Gerd Jansen was born in Goch am Niederrhein (Germany) and studied physics and sculpture. The emotive aspect of music revealed through the process of composition gave him the desire to try out similar means of approach to the visual arts at an early age. It was not until 1997 that he found his “instrument of composition” in the simplicity of the Natural Numbers series.

Moreover he founded the "Institut für bildnerisches Denken" together with his wife, the pianist Christine Jansen, in the year 2000 with a wish to bring the subjective realms of art, music and the imagination together with that of the objectively calculating perception of science. Since 2010 the Institute is completely integrated in the project "countune".

Gerd Jansen is publishing his works in a series of books.
You can see it on his website www.gerd-jansen.de

www.bild-konzepte.com is a documentation of earlier concept works by Gerd Jansen and this site is also set up as an interactive Internet Project like countune.