Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait This new series 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 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming. My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned. ~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007 Toothpicks Depicts 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs. Plastic Bottles Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes. Partial zoom: Detail at actual size: Depicts 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million), the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq. Partial zoom: Detail at actual size: Lots more at the website.
Let's see, 1) We recycle paper, even old magazines and catalogs 2) We grow more trees (loggers are people too) 3) We recycle plastics (tons and tons of Plastics) 4) MONEY MONEY MONEY (we also pay a baseball player over 300 million dollars to play a game) so whats the point?
You have to ask? The only point is to try and make America look bad. Only telling half of a story is a great way to do that.
Kind of like showing all these scenes of how cool iraq was before the war. Some of these photos were actually used in the trial against saddam hussein. Seems like he was a WMD all by himself. It must have been wicked awesome living there before the 'infadels' came in....
Long, long time ago... I can still remember... how that music used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance, I could make those people dance and maybe they'd be happy for a while... I know EVERY word to that song (part one and two) by memory. If that's not American, I don't know what is. I also know all of the words to "Same Old Lang Syne" and that's a Fogelbergy Christmas song. America is not all bad.
No Problem. I was just pointing out the funny stuff about America that makes me like it. I like how people always have to wave at each other in boats. I don't know how it is in other countries, but it's a big deal here. I like seeing what terrible bands we will get at the interstate fair and how people go nuts with the fireworks on 4th of July. To me, the United States isn't the assholes in suits, it's what we working people do with our everyday lives... I don't think it's a bad thing to just want to live your life with your head in the sand. If I thought about all of the pain in the world, I would literally have to kill myself so that I would not be a part of it.
Nothing crazy or stupid about that. Just not very p.c. to show your sentimental side. We knew it was there all along anyways.
There was this American with a really cool watch. It interfaced with a satellite, and where ever he was it automatically sychronized the day an date to adjust for timezones. This was very convient for the man, since he was a world traveler. Once he landed in Iraq, and when he looked down at his watch he noticed that instead of the time and date there was a simple error message which read "unable to set date due to computation error." He took the watch back to the dealer, and got it fixed. Seems the watch needed a program update that allowed the watch to display a date 600 years in the past.
Yee-haaa! It's true, Phat. I haven't been there since it was bombed back into the stoneage (or "600 years in the past" as Barry puts it) by the oh-so-civilised Americans in 2003. We'll bomb you to Stone Age, US told Pakistan...and as we can see - they're not kidding!
There is no competition anyway right? I mean, if you believe the NIE reports. nursey, I wasnt trying to make a point, just curious. I'm suprised it was that recently.
