IEEE Spectrum September, 2007 - 13
426 000 Discarded
Cellphones
We live in a consumerist society. The numbers are staggering,
whether it's how many cellphones and plastic bottles we
discard, cigarettes we smoke, paper and plastic bags we use
at the supermarket, or painkillers we pop. How can we imagine
the quantities involved?
If you're Seattle artist Chris Jordan, you pick a number,
such as the number of cellphones that are retired in the United
States every day, and figure out a way to show all 426 000 of
them. Here, each speck of gray represents a phone, clearly
visible in the original 150- by 275-centimeter picture.
Here's how you build an image of 426 000 cellphones.
(1) Get 400 actual phones. (2) Pour them into a wooden
frame on your studio's floor. (3) Photograph from directly
above. (4) Stir. Make a similar but not identical photograph.
(5) Repeat 198 times. (Each of the 200 images will be used five
or six times.) (6) Spend the next two weeks manically trimming,
by hand, around the edges of each of the 200 photographs,
airbrushing out all the fractional phones. (7) Cut and paste
1065 times, moving the individual photographs around for the
best visual effect and to keep the five or six identical copies
as far away from one another as possible. Finally, (8) send a
DVD with your 1-gigabyte file to a specialty shop in New York
equipped with a Canon inkjet printer with a 60-inch-wide roll
(152 cm) for printing, mounting, and framing. (9) Ship the
framed artwork to the Von Lintel Gallery, in New York City.
Jordan's Web site, http://www.chrisjordan.com, contains
images from the complete exhibit, "Running the Numbers,"
that included Cell Phones, 2007.
Photo by Chris Jordan
www.spectrum.ieee.org
September 2007 | IEEE Spectrum | NA 25
http://www.chrisjordan.com
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2007
IEEE Spectrum September, 2007 - Cover1
IEEE Spectrum September, 2007 - Cover2
IEEE Spectrum September, 2007 - 1
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IEEE Spectrum September, 2007 - 49
IEEE Spectrum September, 2007 - Cover3
IEEE Spectrum September, 2007 - Cover4
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