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A Haverford colleague just led me yesterday to an exhibit just opened @ the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. Called Running the Numbers, it features a series of photographic prints by Chris Jordan that attempt to portray staggering statistics through intricately detailed large-scale panels. I haven't yet been to see the exhibit, but I did spend some time with my friend's book of the photographs. My experience was one of being astonished by the beauty of the image, then led in closer, closer, closer until I realized w/ horror that what I was seeing close-up was, oh, a representation of the 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags used in the US every hour.

This seems to me a great-and-awful representation of what Mark describes below: first, his evocation of some kinds of new (within the past century) storytelling devices in the arts, which give us a glimpsing consciousness of what little we can perceive of the larger context. And, even more explicitly, an attempt to portray his second astonishing idea that "if there is no consciousness to measure [time] then perhaps it is not measurable because it has no phenomenal properties." It seems to me that what Chris Jordan is doing is trying to make both measureable and comprehensible that which we find immeasurable and incomprehensible: numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions.

Just to give you a taste of the experience, here is a 3x zoom of the print called "Paper Bags, 2007." My experience was one of seeing first something beautifully evocative--a forest, perhaps, of birch trees? And then...oof!

I'd be interested to know what you see. And if you'd like to see more, go to Chris Jordan: Photographic Arts.