| Bush's war is costing us $315 billion at last count. A staggering amount, of money, but people have a hard time contextualizing large numbers. (This is part of the reason the public has a hard time understanding things like astronomy and evolution, but that's for another topic). Once you get past everyday numbers (mortage payments, taxes, yearly salary) sums of money above a million can be hard to relate to each other. I stumbled across a great presentation that gives you a sense of the scale (hat tip to Crooks and Liars) by using stacks of dollar bills. Here's just a taste:    The stack for billions of dollars dwarfs the above images, as you can imagine, but you have to see it for yourself. On a related note an artist by the name of Chris Jordan makes giant images of waste material with a unique approach: 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. You may have seen Jordan on Moyers or Colbert recently. As one example of his work, this is an image of 60,000 plastic bags:  Each one of those little tiny colored squares is one plastic bag. here's a zoom view:  and another zoom: 
The top image, again, represents 60,000 plastic bags. The vast majority of those go to landfills (or wind up blowing around and stuck in a tree somewhere). What is the meaning of 60,000? That is the number of bags consumed in the US - not weekly or hourly or each minute - but every FIVE SECONDS. Scary, scary stuff - in the time it takes to, say, dial a phone number or write your signature in cursive, it's that many bags used. |
MLN is powered by