Chris Jordan's "Running the Numbers" uses massive installations of discarded items—426,000 cell phones, 2 million plastic bottles every five minutes—to show the scale of American waste. Christian Nold's biomapping records heart rate and emotion while people walk through cities, turning the data into maps of how urban spaces feel.
Hey guys, it's Tom. This week Karen and I are here in lovely Camden, Maine at the PopTech conference, which is one of a couple of conferences that I really love to attend every year. And I thought this year instead of trying to blog it, which I've never been really successful in doing except little just bits and snippets, I thought what I would try to do is to try to make a video about what's happening. So let me see if I can give that a shot. So the conference kicked off with a presentation by Chris Jordan. Chris is a, I guess he's an image artist. He started off as a photographer and made some beautiful photographs which he showed of the area of his real focus, which is mass consumerism, mass culture and consumerism. He, in his early work, He had a series of images called Intolerable Beauty photographs, which are just amazing, that really demonstrate the scale of everyday waste that is part of American culture. He focuses only on America. So, you know, he would show how different things look in the kind of enormous numbers that we hear about every day. For example, he showed hundreds of thousands of cell phone chargers in a dump that had been just discarded there. And, you know, it's an amazing image to see all those things. He had an image of 426,000 cell phones that had been discarded. And, you know, when again you hear the numbers, they have an impact, but not like the kind of impact that seeing these images do. He showed images of plastic bottles. In the United States, 2 million plastic bottles for water and other beverages are discarded every 5 minutes. And he had an image of that. Again, 2 million every 5 minutes. I mean, you know, trying to get a picture of what that's really like, I mean, in an image that that captured some of what that's like, but he started to feel like he was failing at really being able to capture the real vividness. So he sold his large format cameras and he got a digital camera and started to construct images to really give the viewer an emotional picture of what these numbers mean. For example, there are 106,000 aluminum cans discarded in the United States every 30 seconds. 106,000. Well, that number is great in the abstract— great meaning powerful and large— but when you see it, when you see what that image looks like— and I'll put links to all these talks up in the, in the description— when you see what that looks like, it just has an entirely different impact on you. This whole new set of work that he's doing is called Running the Numbers, and it really does have a the kind of effect on you that, that's really startling. And I wrote a blog not too long ago about eco-shame and how we're living in a time when sometimes the scale of our consumption can actually make one feel shameful. And I think the more we see images like this, the more that experience is going to become common for many of us. The second presenter this morning was a fellow named Christian Nold, and Christian does something called biomapping. Now biomapping, you would think, would be sort of, you know, something to do with epidemiology or, you know, diseases or some other kind of— but instead, what his version of biomapping is, is getting individuals to walk through cities and to record their physiological and emotional experiential record while they're going through those cities. He's devised, you know, half of the world's population today lives in cities. And so, you know, cities are all of these very complex interactions that go on. And what Christian is trying to do is to create devices that capture the experiences of people going through those. Now, these devices, he started off by creating a device that was a blindfold and a set of earmuffs that made the participant deaf and blind. And so the only sense that you could really use to experience the world was smell. And so we had participants describe the smells in various areas of the cities and environments that they were in. And not just, you know, it smells like roses or it smells like tar, but to to describe their emotional reactions to those experiences. And then he codes all of those reactions along with the— he has a GPS device in each of these little gizmos that he makes. And he creates maps with— he has many, many people doing this. And then he creates maps that capture the essence of the experience in a particular place for particular people. He went beyond that, that kind of sensory deprivation approach to creating a device that is sort of a physiological monitor. It monitors things like, you know, heart rate and respiration and, you know, really giving some sense of what the physiological reaction to the place is and then having the person also describe what their emotional reaction to being in that place was like. Now, again, the outcome of this, which I'll link in the description, the outcome of this are physical maps of cities. He had a very interesting one of San Francisco. He lives in London, so he has several different parts of London. He gets people together in groups after they've been subjects. I call them subjects because they sound like experiments, but participants in this art mapping project, whatever in the world you can call it. They talk about their common experience of being in these places, and he captures all of that in a map, which is a very clever data representational device that he's come up with. So I'm gonna stop there. There's an awful lot to do. I'm gonna, I'll go on to part 2 of this morning's session whenever I can, but I hope you enjoy this. I really wanted to give you a flavor of what it's like to be here at this great conference. So I'll talk to you guys again soon. Take care, bye-bye.
