Magical Urbanism, a website about urbanization, design and social change, is maintained by Mike Ernst. I'm an urban planner and designer based in San Francisco. I am a graduate of the Chris Jordan Visualizes American Consumption
Chris Jordan is an American artist who creates larger-than-human scale digital images representing the staggering numbers behind American consumption. Says the artist:
Running the Numbers 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 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.
I recently got the chance to check out some of Jordan’s works at an exhibit currently on display at the David Brower Center in Berkeley. I’d highly recommend checking it out. If you can’t make the exhibit, be sure to check out Jordan’s TED talk.
Here are a few of his creations. The images are very large, sometimes huge (for example, the first image showing prison uniforms is 10×23 feet over six vertical panels).
Prison Uniforms (2007)
Full image:
Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. The U.S. has the largest prison population of any country in the world.
Detail:
Plastic Bags (2007)
Full image:
Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.
Detail:
Cigarettes (2007)
Full image:
Depicts 65,000 cigarettes, equal to the number of American teenagers under age eighteen who become addicted to cigarettes every month.
Detail:
Shipping Containers (2007)
Full image:
Depicts 38,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every twelve hours.
Detail:
Light Bulbs (2008)
Full image:
Depicts 320,000 light bulbs, equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.).
Detail:
Paper Bags (2007)
Full image:
Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.
Detail:
Cell Phones (2007)
Full image:
Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.
Detail:
Jet Trails (2007)
Full image:
Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.
Detail:
Plastic Cups (2008)
Full image:
Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.
Detail:
Link to the artist’s website.
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3 Responses to “Chris Jordan Visualizes American Consumption”
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[...] a weekly basis). To see what that looks like check out the work of Chris Jordan, who visualizes the amount of stuff that we consume (and thus waste) on a regular [...]
Beautiful designs. Is this photoshop work? Love the storage containers, they should be put to use as low cost housing.
oliver says:Works like this are irrelevant and annoyingly pretentious. If he doesn’t want to use bags, smoke or fly then that’s fine, but why try to demean human technological advancement and act as though everything that makes his life achievable (i.e. not living on a farm creating every facet of his food/nutrients) isn’t assisted by consumerism? Maybe show the amount of resources he used in order to get these developed, or the amount of disposed cameras every hour? hypocrit.
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[...] a weekly basis). To see what that looks like check out the work of Chris Jordan, who visualizes the amount of stuff that we consume (and thus waste) on a regular [...]
Beautiful designs. Is this photoshop work? Love the storage containers, they should be put to use as low cost housing.
Works like this are irrelevant and annoyingly pretentious. If he doesn’t want to use bags, smoke or fly then that’s fine, but why try to demean human technological advancement and act as though everything that makes his life achievable (i.e. not living on a farm creating every facet of his food/nutrients) isn’t assisted by consumerism? Maybe show the amount of resources he used in order to get these developed, or the amount of disposed cameras every hour? hypocrit.