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10,000 by Brooklyn-based artist Francis Hollenkamp

Francis created this art installation comprised of 10,000 little green and brown plastic toy soldiers. The miniature military forces were organized into evenly squared rows and columns, and separated by weapon of choice.

“I created the piece in an attempt to visually explore notions of numbers, identity, and scale, particularly as these concepts relate to how we perceive and act in the everyday world. One is able to rapidly, accurately, and concretely imagine objects in low quantities. Five pencils imagined will not vary widely from five pencils in reality. Our ability to perform these tasks, however, diminishes rapidly as quantities increase. The conjured mental image of 100 or 1000 pencils will likely not be overly realistic. Despite this, most humans are being asked to comprehend and react to numbers of vast scale on a daily basis. We consistently hear things like “trillions of dollars” and “millions of refugees”, but to what degree can we as humans even really understand these phrases? Often, these gigantic numbers remain in the realm of abstraction to our conscious mind, leaving a disconnection between the number itself and the object to which it’s referring. In this way, one can describe a million dollars without ever really thinking about what a dollar is or speak about a group of 100,000 people without ever thinking about any of these people individually.

In 10,000, I sought to confront the viewer with this disconnection. By presenting 10,000 toy soldiers, sub-divided into easily countable groups, my hope for the piece was that it could provide a platform by which the viewer could both better understand 10,000 as a number as well as allow for this entity to be broken down into smaller groups and eventually, the individual.”

[via My Modern Metropolis]