流动数字--克里斯·乔丹

展览：  流 动 数 字
艺术家： 克里斯·乔丹
时间：  2011.4.16-2011.5. 15
开幕酒会： 2011.4.16,  3:00-6:00pm
地点：  其他画廊 北京空间
              北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路798艺术区706北三街西

EXHIBITION:      Running the Numbers
ARTIST:              Chris Jordan
DURATION:       Apr 16th-May 15th , 2011
VERNISSAGE:    3pm-6pm, Apr 16th, 2011
VENUE:             Other Gallery l Beijing Space
3th Street North 706, 798 ART, Chaoyang District,

《流动数字》(Running the Numbers)透过严谨精确的统计数字来审视西方文化。每一个图像都描绘了某种事物的一定数量：两百万只塑料瓶（美国每五分钟之内消耗掉的瓶子数量），十万六千个铝罐（人们在每30秒内所消费的铝罐数量）等。我希望这些表现数量的图像不仅仅只是像我们每天在文章和书籍里看到的单纯的数字而已，而是发挥出不同的作用。数字让人感觉是抽象的，麻木的，很难将其与它们所代表的重要现象联系起来，也很难赋予它们深刻的意义。

在如此庞杂的现象中寻求意义并非易事，因为现象本身就是不可见的，它们分布在地球上数以万计的不同地方。这些废品不是珠穆朗玛峰，我们无法去攀登朝圣，也不能清楚地将我们所抛弃的废物全部聚集起来，更无法对它们有什么触目惊心的感受。

相反，我们可以通过麻木冷漠的缺乏感情色彩的数字语言来理解这些问题的严重性。社会学家告诉我们，人类的思想无法切实理解千以上的数字；然而，如今我们每天都所接触到的大量现象都以万、亿甚至兆来计算。使这一挑战变得更加严峻的是我们作为世界上67亿人中的一员，感到自己是如此的微不足道。我们完全暴露在时代的恐惧面前，而且随时都会被征服，随时都会惊慌失措，精神失常。

我认为关注这些问题并使它们对我们个人产生意义是很有价值的，虽然会有气愤、恐惧、悲伤、恼怒和其他各种情绪混杂在里面，但这些都是这一过程所必须承担的。也许，这些令人不快的感受能够有助于我们团结起来，能够为作为一种新的地球村公民的个人与集体的行动提供勇气和动力。

我自己作为一个美国消费者，并不想去指手画脚；但是我真切地明白当我们在思考那些难题而无法轻易得出答案之时，需要反躬自问，也许改善我们思维和行动的方法就存在于我们内心。所以，我希望这些图像能够成为某种文化自省的渠道。它可能让人感到不那么愉快，但是我从中可以看出，在挑战自我意识的过程中，我们至少知道自己是清醒的。

——克里斯·乔丹
Running the Numbers looks at contemporary western culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: two million plastic bottles (five minutes of bottle consumption in the U.S.), 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of our can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities 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 the profoundly important phenomena they represent.

Finding meaning in these mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses.

Instead, we are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these issues through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions nowadays. Compounding this challenge is our sense of insignificance as individuals in a world of 6.7 billion people. And if we fully open ourselves to the horrors of our times, we also risk becoming overwhelmed, panicked, or emotionally paralyzed.

I believe it is worth connecting with these issues and allowing them to matter to us personally, despite the complex mixtures of anger, fear, grief, rage, anxiety, and other feelings that this process can entail. Perhaps these uncomfortable feelings can become part of what connects us, serving as fuel for courageous individual and collective action as citizens of a new kind of global community.

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on difficult questions in the absence of easy answers, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these images can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.
 
——Chris Jordan