credit: chris jordon
A futurist friend, Lawrence Wilkinson, put posted this in one of his daily mailings about technology and life: “Artist Chris Jordan has embarked on a series of works that consider “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..."
The Asia Society takes a multimedia look at electronic waste shipped overseas and the toxic effect it has on places such as Guiyu, China--known as "trash town." With an interview with Michael Zhao of the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society.