You may have noticed some of Chris Jordan’s work before, maybe not realizing what he’s up to. His work often looks like one thing (a rather beautiful abstract textured painting or photo), only to become something else entirely upon closer examination (the tiny elements making up the texture are paper cups, or mobile phones, for example), depicting some aspect of the vast quantities of some item or substance that we discard. His idea is to try to make those vast numbers – which are so vast we don’t really comprehend them instinctively (can you visualize a million of anything?) – much more accessible, or able to be personalized. It is key to do this (as we’ve discussed here before) in order for each of us to be encouraged to act locally in our own lives in order to affect great global changes. You can get a rather good look at some of his work and hear him talk about it very movingly at his recent TED talk*. It is only about 11 minutes long…. I’m sure that even though you’ve got important things to do, you’re not so busy that you can’t find that time for this.
I’m curious to hear what you think… It is embedded below:
-cvj
(*thanks Ilaria!)
Neat. I guess you could call this “applied” conceptual art.
I’ve seen this talk. It’s superb. I love how he creates a way to easily give people a new perspective of quantities. Humans are great at adapting; it seems to be a survival technique. If there is so much repetition in social problems it becomes white noise. We learn to live with the problems. We adapt. Feynman was known for having the habit of steping back and looking at the world from a different perspective. I think this is where thinking thrives and how progress is made. I’d love to see more instances where the whitenoise is put under the microscope.