Coherence is not overrated

Since returning to civilian life two weeks ago I've been gleefully working on my thesis like a madman. It took almost a week and a half of steady work just to review all the notes I had accumulated from my last six months at McGill and during subsequent year and a half of articling and lawyering. Its pretty amazing to see it all come together, whatever it is. Tables of Contents can be such thrilling and reassuring beacons, but also somewhat melancholy. I unfortunately did have to ditch the rhizomaic double-helixical structure I imagined the thesis taking in the interests of actually finishing the god damn thing.

I make a lot of hay out of Chris Jordan's 2006-2007Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait series. Based on statistical data, he uses incredibly oversized canvases to show the "simultaneity" of otherwise discrete every day acts, such as flying in a plane or disposing of a plastic bottle. In our ego-centric world, these acts are often only experienced (and thus known and reacted upon) in the microscopic abstract as individual acts or in the macroscopic abstract as statistical figures in a government report somewhere. An encounter with Jordan's 20-foot photographs is a true confrontation and a chance to look at consumption otherwise than tiny individual acts or inconceivable wholes. Knowing that each individual object in the photograph was arranged by the artists hand further impresses the sense that each object has a life beyond the moment the consumer makes use of it.


"Jet Trails" depicts 11,000 jet trails -- equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours


"Plastic Bottles" Depicts two million plastic bottle beverages, the number used in the US every five minutes

March 28th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: simultaneity, Chris Jordan, thesis

Worldometers

Watch the counter on human births tick by, a life a second, and tell me that Worldometers is anything other than an absolutely incredible website. It gives you an amazing sense of the living earth, its dynamism, and cumulative human activity by giving you something to sense. 6.6 billion is a big number, but it seems more tactile when watching the population ticker flit by. With every tick, I try to recall someone I know as if they were just being born. It is a heady experience to try and conceive of a life with every second, potential and actual lived experience and meaning compressed into a moment replaced only by the next and the next. What a wealth -- and what a burden. Probably your entire world will be exhausted in about 100 ticks. And for all that exhaustion, you then have to figure the sensation needs to be repeated another 66 million times before you've accounted for the human population of earth.

Try the same experiment with the other tracked objects. Testing the limits of the imagination to track the number of bikes produced in a minute (can you visualize 100 bikes as each pops into existence?) or the number of lightening strikes per second on earth (about 100) gives you a good sense of your sense of the earth, and your slice of it, on a daily basis.

April 29th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: simultaneity, worldometers, phenomenology, proximity