Visual statistics – the madness of consumerism
In Running the Numbers – An American Self-Portrait, Chris Jordan has put together a brilliant set of images that…
… 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.
My favourites are:
426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day:
Detail:
Here’s a forest of 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour:
Detail:
There are some disturbing images in this clever collection.
Check out the rest of: Running the Numbers.
Related posts:
- More madness from Bush – escape to Mars Let's put the Earth right before we go off spending...
- Zipf Distributions, log-log graphs and Site Statistics Word frequency follows the Zipf Distribution. We use log-log graphs...
- Logarithms – a visual introduction Logarithms are just indices written down on the line....
- Breathing Earth – visual display of world polluters Here is a nice simulation of world pollution, indicating who...
- Great statistics – gapminder Statistics does not need to be boring. Gapminder.org has brilliant...
17 Aug 2009 at 6:55 am Link to this comment
I found this art work to be very powerful. I am doing a college paper on consumerism and would like to use one of the pictures (images) from Running the Numbers to illustrate a point. Can someone please let me know who i would need to contact for permissionn.
Thank You
Andrea
17 Aug 2009 at 8:42 pm Link to this comment
Hi Andrea. Since you have no commercial intent, your use of the image constitutes “fair dealing” for academic (and educational) purposes. You don’t need to seek permission, but you do need to give proper attribution. (Say where it is from, the date you accessed it, the name of the photographer.)
This is contrary to what he states on this page: http://www.chrisjordan.com/contact.php. If you are worried about it, his email is on that page.