There is an excellent article about Damien Hirst's dot paintings by Adrian Searle in today's Guardian (see it here). The article mentions Hirst's recent announcement that he is producing a picture that will be 1000 by 1000 dots that will take 9 years to complete.
I wondered what 1000 by 1000 dots would look like and set about constructing a simulation of it.
That's not it above. That's only 100 by 100.
The 1000 by 1000 file I generated is available for you to inspect but first a word of WARNING.
It's a big pdf file (13MB) and takes a while to render in Adobe Reader (a couple of minutes on my laptop). Being pdf, it's a vector format so you can blow it up to any level of definition you like (unlike the jpeg above). Consequently, if you are prepared to wait for it to redraw, you can check that the dots are all perfect circles rendered in different random colours.
The link to the 13MB pdf file is http://dl.dropbox.com/u/51944254/sistema7.geo.pdf. It has to be a pdf so you can blow it up to see that there are indeed 1M perfect circles.
The image as a whole looks grey from a distance, but by blowing it up you can get an impression of how it would look in gallery if it was (say) 12 metres square and each dot about 1cm across.
I look forward to seeing that in the turbine hall in 2020, where presumably it can be even bigger (3cm dots?)
added later: see my more recent post "Spots - an Artist's Book"