Yesterday, I saw the Chris Jordan exhibit at the Pacific Science Centre. Jordan uses his artwork to speak about the problems of over consumption and pollution. His pictures are essentially photoshopped aggregates of every day things.
Perhaps his most famous piece is the re-rendering of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat using multiples of aluminium cans:
In some sense Jordan is the anti-Tufte; using huge amounts of ink to render a single number. And perhaps this suggests an extension to Tufte’s views on the efficiency of a data graphic in terms of the additional information (opinion, social commentary, etc.) that is carried by this inefficiency.
At the end of the day, while fascinating at first, Jordan expresses a single point using a single technique.
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