Chris Jordan’s photographic series “Running The Numbers” exhibit opens at the Q2 Gallery in Second Life.

Chris Jordan’s 2007 photographic series “Running The Numbers” is to be exhibited virtually at the Q2 Gallery in Second Life starting Monday April 30th 2007.

Chris Jordan is a Seattle-based photographic artist known for his large-scale images of American mass consumption.

“Running The Numbers” looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on.

Jordan’s hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as those we find daily in news articles and books.

The concept of this exhibition is to convey the scale of the real-life pieces through the 3D Virtual experience of Second Life - as the images lose impact when viewed on standard web pages.

The exhibition includes virtual note-cards explaining each piece and Q2 has also created in-world links to web pages for further reading, and suggested action in the real world.

This exhibition is Chris Jordan’s first foray in to Second Life.

Attributed to Chris Jordan, Artist

“Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.”

“My hope is that images representing these huge quantities in “Running The Numbers” might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of - 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day, or fifteen million sheets of office paper used every five minutes”.

“The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.”

“As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry.”

About Chris Jordan

Chris Jordanis a Seattle-based photographic artist known for his large-scale images of American mass consumption. He is the author of the book. In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss From an Unnatural Disaster published by Princeton Architectural Press.

About Second Life

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by a total of 5,965,898 people from around the globe.