Underpinning Frameworks: Collective Needs in Everyday Life

 

Besides looking at the skylines of the world’s growing cities, how do we apprehend the impact of such intense growth? How can we visualise and understand, on a human scale, this vast and intense amount of urbanisation and consumption taking place? One artist and photographer, Chris Jordan, takes on this challenge through his work in a series titled: Running the Numbers, which looks at contemporary American culture through the lens of the statistic. His work tries to convey the scale at which mass-consumption is taking place. His piece, Plastic Bags (2007) visualizes on a canvas 60”x72” 60,000 plastic bags, the amount used every 5 seconds in the USA. Through this visualization of quantities of consumption, it becomes clear that the sheer volume of material flows is nearly incomprehensible and difficult to connect with from the perspective of the individual. Chris Jordan states that he hopes his work will raise questions about our own roles and responsibilities, that we as individuals have, in a collective that is increasingly “enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming”.