I think there's a tremendous amount of unacknowledged hostility in American culture.

Chris Jordan

Categorized in : Think American I Think Culture

Finding meaning in global 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.

meaning finding feeling earth

If you sit down among hundreds of thousands of albatrosses in a field, pretty soon you'll be completely surrounded by them, as they come walking up toward us and nibble on our shoelaces and just look right at us out of curiosity.

look you curiosity walking

I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.

painter crave photograph way

My ideas tend to arise out of nowhere when I'm not intentionally trying to think of something.

something think trying ideas

There's an axiom I live by: 'There is no art without politics.' You either choose to engage it, or you choose political apathy. This ties in with ideas around real-time performance and feedback.

you politics ideas art

I hate the word 'rendering,' as it equates to 'pouring concrete' on ideas that demand continuing dialog. 'Trade secrets' imply hoarding of knowledge.

secrets hate ideas knowledge

I'm not against shock and horror. In fact, I really belive in facing the dark realities of our time as the first step in coming out of denial. So we have to look into the darkness.

step look darkness time

Set your compass to beauty, humor, and grief; stay the course no matter what, and I'll support you with everything I've got.

you support humor beauty

Activating is about changing people's perceptions of overlooked or invisible spaces. A building can become an archetype, invisible, like for a New Yorker, for example, the Statue of Liberty. You look at it, and it disappears into the thousands of times you've already seen it.

new look you people

I only want to work with transparent ideas and accessible technologies that 'spotlight' the individual's role in society through creativity. I try to live an open-source life.

creativity society work life

American culture is not about experiencing our shame, it's about denying it. It's been that way our whole history.

shame culture history way

One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.

politics war culture art

All of my work is meant to evoke a whole bunch of different layers of discord between the attraction and repulsion that we feel toward our consumer habits and our consumer lives.

consumer feel different work

I find myself walking these lines. Like I might be an artist, but I also might be an activist. And I'm trying to be both in a way that honors both and doesn't stray too far into either.

myself artist walking way

I know that if I were to take ugly photographs, no one would be interested in looking at them.

looking take know ugly

I want people to realize that they matter.

realize matter want people

There is no public out there who needs to change. It's each one of us.

us out who change

I used to be a photographer - and now I'm some kind of digital photographic artist.

some digital photographer artist

What I aspire to is to have the viewer look directly at the subject, as if they're looking through a window at the real thing.

looking look real window

I wasn't interested in politics. My attitude about it was, I can't make a difference no matter what I do. And the truth is, I don't even care enough to try.

politics care truth attitude