The Meaning of Rice
FEBRUARY 17, 2007 Listen to this Story
- Rice and Statistic Exhibit at Mass MoCA
- View the Slideshow
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is attempting give a face to statistics, something people in the news business are always talking about. But instead of using photographs of people or personal stories or any of the usual techniques, they're using rice. One grain of uncooked, long grain rice represents a human being, and another represents another human being and another and another, and suddenly, in the middle of the room you have a small Egyptian looking pyramid of rice meant to represent the entire population of America. Beyond that pyramid is another depicting the population of Brazil. Another pile shows world AIDS deaths. Heaps of statistics are all depicted in heaps of rice. Weekend America's Sean Cole takes us through the exhibit and finds the meaning in it.
Notes and Audio from Reporter Sean Cole
The moment I really understood what "Of All the People in All the World" was about was not looking at the massive pile of rice in the middle of the room that represents all of us, the United States population. It was when I looked at two much smaller piles of rice, juxtaposed beside each other: the number of people who will be born in the world today and the number who will die. The pile delineating how many people will be born was, of course, twice as large. And I could've guessed that. But seeing it depicted like that, I understood the impact of those numbers so much faster than if I'd read them in the paper. It was like, in an instant, I could comprehend how quickly we're filling the Earth. And those little shocks of recognition just multiplied as I walked around — the tiny pile of rice labeled "Population of Boston in 1790" dwarfed next to the pile depicting Boston today; the pile of rice that perished in Hurricane Katrina dwarfed next to the pile that died in the 2004 tsunami. Since I was visiting on Valentine's Day I jokingly asked Craig Stephens — the Associate Director of the theater group who created the exhibit — to weight out the number of Americans who acquire a new STD every year, which I'd read was 19,000,000. He said that would take too long. But he pointed to a big, long sandbar of rice representing the number of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island ever. "That's 12,000,000," he said.
We did weigh out a few of statistics, though. One of them was you: the number of people who listen to this show, 650,000. It was a lot of rice, six big metal pans full plus a few of the smaller pans to boot. You can listen to part of that audio here:
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