Statistics as art

Chris Jordan transforms abstract statistical figures into compelling peices of contemporary art:

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.

(Thanks to Michael Sengpiel)

Gregor Schneider cube Hamburg

A family event called me back into my hometown Hamburg over the weekend. The spae between the Galerie der Gegenwart and the Kunsthalle currently hosts Gregor Schneider's "Cube Hamburg, 2007" - a massive black cube that was banned from the biennale in Venice because organizers feared it might provoke islamic extremists responses due to its similarity with the Kaba in Mekka. Although I was told that the artist denied any intentional similarity during the presentation of his work, I consider the resemblance as quite striking. I really liked it.