TED2008
Chris Jordan: Turning powerful stats into art
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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 - Artist
Chris Jordan runs the numbers on modern American life -- making large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about our stuff. Full bio
Chris Jordan runs the numbers on modern American life -- making large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about our stuff. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:12
My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously,
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on a collective level.
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And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors
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that we're in denial about,
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and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness.
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And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, everyday.
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It's like when you're mean to your wife
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because you're mad at somebody else.
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Or when you drink a little too much at a party, just out of anxiety.
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Or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt, or whatever.
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And when we do these kind of things,
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when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors,
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then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence
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that nobody wants, and no one intended.
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And that's what I look at with my photographic work.
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01:00
This is an image I just recently completed, that is --
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when you stand back at a distance,
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it looks like some kind of neo-Gothic, cartoon image
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of a factory spewing out pollution.
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01:11
And as you get a little bit closer,
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it starts looking like lots of pipes, like maybe a chemical plant,
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01:18
or a refinery, or maybe a hellish freeway interchange.
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01:22
And as you get all the way up close,
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you realize that it's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups.
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01:28
And in fact, this is one million plastic cups,
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which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights
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in the United States every six hours.
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We use four million cups a day on airline flights,
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and virtually none of them are reused or recycled.
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They just don't do that in that industry.
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Now, that number is dwarfed
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by the number of paper cups we use every day,
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01:51
and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages,
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most of which is coffee.
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I couldn't fit 40 million cups on a canvas,
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but I was able to put 410,000. That's what 410,000 cups looks like.
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02:03
That's 15 minutes of our cup consumption.
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And if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life,
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that's the size it would be.
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And there's an hour's worth of our cups.
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02:12
And there's a day's worth of our cups.
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You can still see the little people way down there.
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02:15
That's as high as a 42-story building,
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02:17
and I put the Statue of Liberty in there as a scale reference.
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02:23
Speaking of justice, there's another phenomenon going on in our culture
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that I find deeply troubling, and that is that America, right now,
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has the largest percentage of its population in prison
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of any country on Earth.
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One out of four people, one out of four humans in prison
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are Americans, imprisoned in our country.
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02:43
And I wanted to show the number.
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The number is 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated in 2005.
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And that's gone up since then, but we don't have the numbers yet.
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So, I wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms,
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and in the actual print of this piece,
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each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge.
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They're tiny. They're barely visible as a piece of material,
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and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas
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that was larger than any printer in the world would print.
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03:09
And so I had to divide it up into multiple panels
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03:11
that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide.
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03:13
This is that piece installed in a gallery in New York --
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those are my parents looking at the piece.
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03:20
(Laughter)
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03:23
Every time I look at this piece,
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I always wonder if my mom's whispering to my dad,
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"He finally folded his laundry."
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03:28
(Laughter)
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03:31
I want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction.
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03:33
And this particular one is about cigarette addiction.
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03:37
I wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of Americans
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who die from cigarette smoking.
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More than 400,000 people die in the United States every year
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from smoking cigarettes.
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And so, this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes.
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03:51
And, as you slowly step back,
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you see that it's a painting by Van Gogh, called "Skull with Cigarette."
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It's a strange thing to think about, that on 9/11,
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when that tragedy happened, 3,000 Americans died.
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And do you remember the response?
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It reverberated around the world,
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and will continue to reverberate through time.
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It will be something that we talk about in 100 years.
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04:13
And yet on that same day, 1,100 Americans died from smoking.
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And the day after that, another 1,100 Americans died from smoking.
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And every single day since then, 1,100 Americans have died.
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And today, 1,100 Americans are dying from cigarette smoking.
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04:27
And we aren't talking about it -- we dismiss it.
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The tobacco lobby, it's too strong.
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We just dismiss it out of our consciousness.
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And knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes,
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we continue to allow our children, our sons and daughters,
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to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking.
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And this is what the next piece is about.
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This is just lots and lots of cigarettes: 65,000 cigarettes,
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which is equal to the number of teenagers
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who will start smoking this month, and every month in the U.S.
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More than 700,000 children in the United States aged 18 and under
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begin smoking every year.
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05:09
One more strange epidemic in the United States
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05:15
that I want to acquaint you with
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05:17
is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs.
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05:23
This is an image I've made out of lots and lots of Vicodin.
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05:27
Well, actually, I only had one Vicodin
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that I scanned lots and lots of times.
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05:31
(Laughter)
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And so, as you stand back, you see 213,000 Vicodin pills,
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which is the number of hospital emergency room visits
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yearly in the United States,
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attributable to abuse and misuse of prescription painkillers
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and anti-anxiety medications.
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One-third of all drug overdoses in the U.S. --
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and that includes cocaine, heroin, alcohol, everything --
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one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications.
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05:58
A strange phenomenon.
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05:59
This is a piece that I just recently completed
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about another tragic phenomenon. And that is the phenomenon,
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this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery.
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384,000 women, American women, last year
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went in for elective breast augmentation surgery.
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06:21
It's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift,
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given to young girls who are about to go off to college.
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So, I made this image out of Barbie dolls,
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and so, as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern,
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06:39
and as you get all the way back, you see 32,000 Barbie dolls,
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which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries
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that are performed in the U.S. each month.
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The vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21.
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06:54
And strangely enough, the only plastic surgery
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that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction,
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and most of that is being done by men.
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07:02
Now, I want to emphasize that these are just examples.
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I'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues.
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07:09
They're just examples.
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07:12
And the reason that I do this, it's because I have this fear
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that we aren't feeling enough as a culture right now.
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07:20
There's this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment.
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07:23
We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief
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about what's going on in our culture right now,
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what's going on in our country,
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the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world.
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They've gone missing; these feelings have gone missing.
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Our cultural joy, our national joy is nowhere to be seen.
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07:43
And one of the causes of this, I think,
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is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview,
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this holoptical worldview, this holographic image
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that we're all trying to create in our mind
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of the interconnection of things: the environmental footprints
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1,000 miles away of the things that we buy;
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the social consequences 10,000 miles away
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of the daily decisions that we make as consumers.
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08:09
As we try to build this view,
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and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture,
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the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers:
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numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions,
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in the billions and now in the trillions.
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Bush's new budget is in the trillions, and these are numbers
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that our brain just doesn't have the ability to comprehend.
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We can't make meaning out of these enormous statistics.
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And so that's what I'm trying to do with my work,
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is to take these numbers, these statistics
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from the raw language of data, and to translate them
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into a more universal visual language, that can be felt.
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Because my belief is, if we can feel these issues,
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if we can feel these things more deeply,
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then they'll matter to us more than they do now.
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And if we can find that,
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then we'll be able to find, within each one of us,
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what it is that we need to find to face the big question,
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which is: how do we change?
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That, to me, is the big question that we face as a people right now:
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how do we change? How do we change as a culture,
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and how do we each individually take responsibility
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for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of,
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and that is our own behavior?
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My belief is that you don't have to make yourself bad
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to look at these issues.
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I'm not pointing the finger at America in a blaming way.
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I'm simply saying, this is who we are right now.
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And if there are things that we see
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that we don't like about our culture,
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then we have a choice.
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The degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface,
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to bring to this question, the depth of character that we can summon,
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as we show up for the question of how do we change --
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it's already defining us as individuals and as a nation,
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and it will continue to do that, on into the future.
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And it will profoundly affect the well-being, the quality of life
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of the billions of people
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who are going to inherit the results of our decisions.
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I'm not speaking abstractly about this,
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I'm speaking -- this is who we are in this room,
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right now, in this moment.
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10:58
Thank you and good afternoon.
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11:03
(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Chris Jordan - ArtistChris Jordan runs the numbers on modern American life -- making large-format, long-zoom artwork from the most mindblowing data about our stuff.
Why you should listen
Photographer Chris Jordan trains his eye on American consumption. His 2003-05 series "Intolerable Beauty" examines the hypnotic allure of the sheer amount of stuff we make and consume every day: cliffs of baled scrap, small cities of shipping containers, endless grids of mass-produced goods.
His 2005 book In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster is a chilling, unflinching look at the toll of the storm. And his latest series of photographs, "Running the Numbers," gives dramatic life to statistics of US consumption. Often-heard factoids like "We use 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes" become a chilling sea of plastic that stretches beyond our horizon.
In April 2008, Jordan traveled around the world with National Geographic as an international eco-ambassador for Earth Day 2008.
Chris Jordan | Speaker | TED.com