a single grain of rice = demograophics

Of All The People In All The World (UK) uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statisitcs to startling and powerful life. It is a physical visualization of the world population demographics, by mapping 1 grain of rice to represent 1 human being.

"We know how big a grain of rice is; we can see that the pile showing the number of Africans taken on British ships to be slaves, for example, is made up of a horrifyingly large number of grains. to render the fact as a number would be to diminish it," James Yarker, stanscafe.co.uk, the creator of the project.



This video shows a bit of one installation (and contains an advertisement at the end).

"When you go into the room full of piles of rice that is Of All the People In All the World ... you are invited to take a single grain of rice in your hand. That grain is you. A lot of other people are in those piles, divided up in different ways to tell us various stories about the aggregates of people who make up the world." Read the whole story by Stephanie Bunbury



Another video of the project, at YouTube (which you cannot see in school).

"When he began the project, Yarker thought that if one could look somehow at 6.2 billion things individually, it would help to understand the human context. "But it's still too big to comprehend." Now, he feels the subject is inexhaustible. "I'd be happy to keep doing this. In each place, you learn more about the world." And the world, he finds, has an infinite number of stories to tell." Banbury