I want to see this in person *SO BAD*
Check out this seriously awesome art exhibit:
Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait
This new series 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. 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 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, 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.
Along the same lines... I also meant to recommend two books recentely: Material world: a global family portrait and Hungry planet: what the world eats by Peter Menzel. When Mom and I went to Ireland, there was an exhibit in the international wing of the airport from the Material World book and it was really amazing. It's taken me taken me this long to get the book. ;-)