3pointD.com

Chris Jordan takes awfully cool photographs that are for the most part “portraits of American mass consumption.” They’re also awfully big, often measuring around five feet tall and eight feet wide. They have to be large-format to fit the 15 million sheets of office paper (used every five minutes) or the 106,000 aluminum cans (drunk every 30 seconds) that Jordan photographs. (The prints are actually huge composites of lots of smaller photographs.) As of yesterday, Jordan’s latest series, Running the Numbers, is on display in the virtual world of Second Life at the Q2 Gallery »in SL’s Palulop region«, which is run by SL resident Sebastian Standish.

Jordan’s photographs are fantastic, and the in-world gallery show is well done, placing enlarged details beside the full photos so that you can see just what the component consumables are that go into each one. I couldn’t help feeling there was an opportunity missed, however. Even in a print that’s huge at avatar scale, it’s hard to get the sense of vastness that the prints probably display in real life (as do the even larger prints of Andreas Gursky).

What I wanted to see was more of what Sebastian did with one of Jordan’s prints, titled “Plastic Bags,” which depicts the 60,000 plastic bags used in the U.S. every five seconds. (Think about that.) In this case, Sebastian blew the print up into a huge rectangle overlooking the gallery:

I don’t know if it represents the volume that 60,000 plastic bags would occupy (which would be cool), but it certainly takes advantage of the 3D space better than just hanging a print. In fact, it would be great to see each of these prints replicated in 3D in Second Life. Can you imagine what 75,000 virtual shipping containers (the number processed through U.S. ports each day) would look like? Of course, this is an entirely different project, requiring a great many more resources, but it’s what occurred to me while looking at Jordan’s prints in Second Life. In any case, I’m glad Sebastian and the Q2 Gallery have brought the photographs in-world. They’re highly recommended and well worth a look.