Graphing Consumption With Photos
Posted by goodmind on October 25th, 2007
Last week, we headed off to Pop!Tech , all set to blog three whole days worth of stimulating presentations, live. Live blogging from a conference sure seems like a good idea ’til you’re actually doing it. Here’s our excuse; Pop!Tech is a summit of eclectic personages, interested in the exploration of major trends, new ideas, and the social impact of new technologies. If it was a meeting of top astronomers to discuss recent trends in the application of stochastic processes, we would have been posting every five minutes just to sustain a pulse. That was not our problem in Maine.
Now that we’ve had about a week to recover, we’re just about ready to put some of the more memorable Pop!Tech presentations into words, in well rounded posts that attempt to do the subject matter justice. Kicking things off: Chris Jordan’s presentation from day one. Though we didn’t agree with everything this Seattle based photographer said (for example, we are skeptical that terrorists attacked our financial and political centers because because we don’t recycle enough) he does have an interesting take on how to make statistical data more relevant and understandable.
Jordan’s underlying premise in both his recent art, and in his Pop!Tech presentation is that hard data doesn’t “move us.” Statistics can only be “brought to life,” and truly comprehended through art. One of the more talked about images from his series “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait” is a startling photograph of 426,000 cell phones, the number of phones “retired” each day.
We can read statistics about how wasteful our consumer society is, but the actual magnitude is little more than an abstraction at best. One must actually see the numbers to fathom the scale of our consumption.
What really grabbed our attention about this presentation though, were the parallels between photographing the detritus of consumer society, and market research. We both rely on statistics to illustrate the cumulative effect of consumer decisions. Jordan referenced Edward R. Tufte’s seminal work “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” and we can’t think of a more appropriate symbol for the unquestionable intersection of art and market research.
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