Video: Picturing excess

Artist Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like. His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics -- like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day.

Chris Jordan runs the numbers on modern American life -- making large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about our stuff.




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Wow! .... Picturing Excess

That is some illuminating artwork there. Gosh, picturing excess is kind of like looking under a high resolution telescope at the moon from afar, and then zooming into a grain of sand, or like looking at a slide and then looking at that slide under the magnifications of a microscope. It makes it all more intuitive, as what a bacteria might think it it were aware of the collective amount of consumption that the whole colony of bacteria is having on an apple core. Or what 1 hydronium molecule might think if it were aware of the collective pOH contribution of all of the hydronium molecules in the water. Exponential scaling is very interesting indeed, it is good to be able to get a picture of the collective body of our materialistic consumption inefficiencies bring forth. However, I guess that is just the result of the forces of businesses, the forces of supply and demand, exerting it's power over nature. A wise man once said "All of the forces of nature, the Grand Unified Field Theory as it could be dubbed, are ruled by the two most basic principals. They are ruled by the intersection of 'Supply and Demand' and the 'Principle of Least Action'"