The Wall

Years ago I ran across a Darfur sim–a simple text-based tool a human rights group created to give the public a better understanding of the genocide in Sudan (a predecessor to the Darfur is Dying site).  It presented a visceral, depressing, individual-level view of the violence:  inevitable attacks during every desperate search for food, water, or supplies. 

The Darfur Wall approaches the crisis on a mass scale, relying on shifting panels and columns of thousands of numbers to visualize the people killed.  Each section of the wall represents ten thousand fatalities.  By selecting a panel, visitors can view a list of numbers, choose one, and make a donation in honor of the genocide’s victims.  Numbers turn from grey to white as viewers choose them, gradually changing the appearance of the wall.  The site gives the donations to Doctors without Borders, Save the Children, and nonprofit groups focused specifically on the crisis in Sudan. 

The site offers an abstract, yet effective, way to visualize the conflict.  Other works have used perceptions of scale to commemorate military or civilian deaths.  The artist who created the Six Million, for example, memorializes those who died in the Holocaust by writing the numbers from one to six million on sheets of paper–an effort that will probably take most of this decade.  More famously, the Vietnam War Memorial appears, on one level, as a mass of data, with the individual names and true impact only emerging as one approaches the monument–essentially transcending scales.