Running the Numbers

Fantastic website worth checking out, it takes an age to load, we're still on dial-up (we've been waiting close to a year for the broadband that we signed up for). Running the Numbers is a Seattle artist, Chris Jordan and his work, a series of things like 32,000 barbie dolls artfully arranged to represent the number of elective breast surgeries performed in the US every six months.

"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 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming."

Chris Jordan.