Advanced visualization

Photographer Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers project contains some fascinating images. I particularly like "Barbie Dolls" because it creates a recognizable image at the "forest" level that ties directly into the statistic being cited. "Plastic Bottles" also creates a compelling image of a "sea" of bottles that is lacking in similar pieces like "Cell Phones" or "Paper Cups". I also like "Cans Seurat" for re-creating a familiar image, but there's no particular reason why /this/ particular image should arise from these particular materials, so it's less captivating than "Barbie Dolls".

The series as a whole would be more powerful, I think, if there was some attempt at common scale to the pieces. Part of the artist's "hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone", but even in images it's impossible to compare the impact of one million plastic cups used every six hours versus 8 million trees harvested every month versus 426,000 cell phones retired every day. How do we know whether these images/statistics are big or normal without anything with which to compare them?

Still and all, a great experiment.

Thread spool art

This past Saturday, we went to "Craft Attack", a family craft activity at the Fleming Museum. While there, we took Connor and Finn through the regular collection, where Connor liked the mummy best and Finn liked the more brightly colored paintings. We also passed through the Material Pursuits collection and made a great discovery: Devorah Sperber's After Van Eyck. I love the use of the commonplace thread spools to represent a pixelized digital image.