Tuesday report
The day began with a workshop with students from Canterbury Avenue High School. This was great fun and as last year very enlightening about American/L.A. culture for us Brits. Part of the workshop involves a fun game where we ask the group questions about themselves such as “Who is wearing jeans?” “Who has a cell phone?” “Who has a brother?” “Who is a Dodgers fan?”. The game is a way of helping them to see how we can learn about the world and its people through numbers and statistics. One of the questions we ask is “Whose parents were born outside the USA?” As with the workshops last year a sizeable majority of the group’s parents were in this category which, from our perhaps naïve British eyes, was exciting and surprising and suggests that the States is still a dynamic country with a very diverse and international population. It will be interesting to ask that question in 30 years time to see what the number will be then. The students were all really engaged with the workshop and the show offering some very interesting suggestions about what statistics could feature the show in the future. They also cleverly noted how the people represented by those grains of rice are connected to each other and have an impact on the way the world is now and on what it might become.
During the rest of the day we worked on sections about homelessness in the USA and LA,; travel and tourism and the population density of the different states of the USA.
-Craig
December 11, 2007 at 5:56 pm
I love seeing how much the installation has changed since my first experience with it on Nov 30. I have been sharing it with friends and distributing the $2 off coupon for this to many people, as so many of the rice piles are really meaningful to me personally. A colleague came to see it with me today and she was actually moved to tears when she saw the pile about the victims of genocide in Rwanda. She knew the story from the news and had seen the film “Hotel Rwanda” but until she saw the rice pile (and how really huge it is in comparison with other statistics) she had not made an emotional connection with that very horrifying stat.