Thursday, April 11, 2013

Chris Jordan

So I was at a dinner this evening, where this guy Chris Jordan gave an amazing talk.

You really should check out his artwork. He specializes in "garbage" - using photographs to give us a sense of the maddening material consumption in our society. It is funny how pictures can make big mind-numbing numbers (of discarded plastic bottles, cellphones, cars etc.) spring to life; how they replace apathy with grief.

His remarkable ability to make us "feel" these big numbers is captured in this TED talk.

A particularly poignant story that he told revolves around the albatrosses on Midway, and the amount of plastic found in the guts of dead baby albatrosses. As a friend apparently said to him, "if I start crying, I am worried I will never stop."


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