World AIDS Day 2008: Join the Fight

What 20 years, 112 million bloggers and a simple pledge have in common.

We’re doing something a little different today. Because today is the 20th anniversary of World Aids Day, a powerful opportunity to reflect on the deadly pandemic that started eating away at the world over 27 years ago — and the one time when it’s particularly not okay to roll our eyes at the overexposed and underaddressed problem.

No need to drum on about the stats, because we all know how frightening they are, but just consider that by the time you finish reading this, 71 new people will be infected with AIDS, adding to the 33 million worldwide living with the disease.

So what can you do? Generally, “awareness” is a comfortable, failure-free way of pretending to be involved in a cause without really being responsible for its tangible success. (Seriously, has “awareness” cured, say, breast cancer?) But AIDS is extraordinary because in this particular case, awareness is action — in a disease where the only cure is prevention, the more people get tested and know how to “be careful,” the less people get infected.

So learn a thing or two about how not to get infected. And, seriously, get tested — the first step to chipping away at the colossal problem is refusing to think of it as an abstraction, and that begins with personal initiative — if you live in the States, find a testing center near you or just text your zip code to “KNOWIT” (566948) and they’ll text back with a nearby center. And if you live elsewhere in the world, enlist Google and a few friends in finding out about local testing options or check out UNAIDS, the United Nations program against HIV/AIDS.

You can also take the World AIDS Campaign leadership pledge and even follow AIDS.gov on Twitter.

If you’re a designer, allot some pro-bono time to doing a compelling piece that raises awareness, moves people and inspires action — talk about using your power for good. 

And if you’re one of the world’s 112 million bloggers, grab the World Aids Day badge and participate in BloggersUnite, an ambitious initiative to leverage the traction of the blogosphere in reaching more people with the simple yet powerful awareness message.

So go ahead, do your part. Because the more the word spreads, the less the disease does. Think about it.

Chris Jordan’s Photographic Visualizations of Excess

What Van Gogh has to do with Big Tobacco and how piles of folded laundry put the prison system in perspective.

The best of art is about something bigger than aestheticism, something that reflects on culture and makes a social statement that moves people. The work of artist Chris Jordan does just that. It grabs culture by its most unsettling truths, then displays them in gripping visuals that are part data, part philosophy, part brilliant photographic art.

Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, Jordan’s latest project, exposes those hidden layers of consumerism, the big truths we give little thought to, by putting the devastating scale of our cultural excess into perspective. A visualization of statistical data, the project attempts to bring a human perspective to the alienating world of numbers.

Each statistically accurate image is a collage of miniature photographs portraying a specific excess:  The 15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes, the 106,000 aluminum cans we chug every 30 seconds, the 3.6 million SUV’s we buy every year, the 2.3 million Americans in prison, and so forth.

Plastic Cups depicts the one million plastic cups U.S. airlines use every 6 hours. Looking at the image from far away, it resembles a neo-industrial landscape where factories are spewing filth into the sky. Closer up, it transforms into a series of interwoven pipes. And really close up, you realize these are all stacks of actual plastic cups.

Barbie Dolls exposes the 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries performed in the U.S. in 2006 through an equal number of Barbie dolls. The soft natural curves of a woman’s body seen in the full-scale image stand in stark contrast to the plasticky unrealness of the dolls in the close-up.

Denali Denial paints a portrait of the parts of nature we’re losing thanks to our reckless unsustainable habits. The image is composed of 24,000 logos from the GMC Yukon Denali, equal to six weeks of sales of that model SUV in 2004.

Watch Chris Jordan’s eye-opening TED talk where he talks about his art, probes uncomfortable truths, and compares public reaction to the 3,000 deaths in 9/11 with the lack thereof to the 11,000 deaths from smoking that day and every other day.

What we admire most is that his art doesn’t aim to point the finger but, rather, to put our individual role as change agents into perspective.

In a world where large numbers have become practically meaningless, it’s easy to glide over the piles of zeroes, but it gets a little harder when we’re looking straight at the building blocks of our apocalypse.

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The Other Electorate

What the presidential election has to do with aliens and coffee cups.

The presidential election is almost upon us, and next leader of the free world is only a few million ballots away. And as important as voting is in shaping the future of the nation, its impact goes far beyond the domestic sphere. Because, after all, electing the so-called “leader of the free world” impacts the “free world” in its non-American entirety. Which is why it’s interesting to see what said “free world” would do if it had a say in the American election.

Enter If The World Could Vote, a politically independent site that lets people from all over the world cast an imaginary Obama/McCain vote in the presidential election. Originally a modest curiosity-inspired initiative by three guys from Iceland, the project has reached critical mass with close to 250,000 international votes to date, a number getting interestingly close to the U.S. population. We won’t gloat and tell you whom the overwhelming majority voted for, but you can see for yourself.

So go ahead, cast your vote (in the great words of a certain someone, yes you can, even if you’re in the U.S.) and join the Facebook group.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget the voiceless group most powerfully impacted by the presidential election — the  nation’s 29.1 million (that’s 10% of the population, for the mathematically-challenged) home-owning, tax-paying aliens who don’t have the right to vote. (Taxation without representation, anyone?) That’s where Aliens Vote comes in — a site that gives people living in the U.S. who are not American citizens (both permanent residents and visa holders) a chance to cast a “what-if” vote for Obama, McCain, or neither.

The project comes from Cuban Council, a small American digital design shop including a number of non-America employees. Results will be revealed after the election, but if you’re anxious for an unofficial prediction, there’s always the fallback option of the infamous 7-11 predictive cups poll.

(And, of course, if you’re not content with just guessing outcomes, make sure you influence them, too: Vote.)

>>> via GOOD, Sun Sentinel

Spotlight Series: Gimme Moore

Why P2P file-sharing can spell the demise of the Bush administration and how not to let American Idol take over the White House.

MOORE VS. BUSH, ROUND 2

We’re doing something a little different today — because today is the day filmmaker-slash-activist Michael Moore’s latest movie, Slacker Uprising, comes out. (Plus, it’s a nice transition from last week’s themes of P2P revolutions and the current White House being easily mistaken for a potato.)

And just like us today, Moore is doing something different with this himself: He’s giving the movie away as a free download, making it the first major feature-length film to debut legally as a free internet download. In his typical convention-defying, sticking-it-to-the-man style, he’s offering not one but five ways to snag it — from iTunes and Amazon Digital downloads to a number of live streaming options.

He’s doing it for two reasons: To get the word out and thus further the film’s ultimate goal of getting more young voters out on November 4, and to thank all his supporters over the years with a free gift on the 20th anniversary of his first film, Roger & Me.

The film was shot over 42 days leading up to the 2004 election, when Moore toured 62 cities across America with the same mission: Turning out a record number of young voters, which he considers a success given young adults voted in greater numbers than they ever had historically, and the youth segment was the only demographic group Kerry won.

(We, on the other hand, are less generous with the acclaim for a year in which American Idol still received more votes than the presidential election — quite the eye-opener when the American public finds a marginally talented popster to be a better idol than the nation’s leader.)

So go download the movie or find a screening near you so you can rub elbows with like-minded potato-haters. (Heck, host one, even.)

And, um, go vote on November 4, mmmkay?