Chris Jordan changed my perspective. After seeing him speak at TED2008, I don’t think I’ll look at my own consumption and waste the same way. Chris is an artist who uses the large scale images to depict the enormous impact of Western culture. His images (below) of the number of plastic cups used by airlines every 6 hours (all one million of them) has me bringing my own cup when I fly. Those images are a part of an exhibit called “Running the Numbers: A Self Portrait.”
Check out Chris’ talk at TED2008 and then visit his site for more of these incredible images.
Chris Jordan -Running the Numbers: A Self-Portrait
“Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.
This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”
~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007
send to friend
TED2008 video - Chris Jorda...
trackback from post 
