PAC: A Century of Charted Devaluation

P(lotting) A(gainst) C(entralization) is a generative data visualization of 100 years of monetary erosion in the United States. Abstracting the design of the 1 Dollar bill, the composition is built from 100 rectangles, one per year. The angled lines inside each rectangle encode that year's annual inflation rate. The steeper the lines, the higher the inflation. Ten circles mark the purchasing power of the dollar at decade intervals from 1925 to 2024. In 1925, each circle is solid white, full cloud coverage representing full purchasing power. As decades pass and purchasing power declines, the cloud cover thins and blue sky breaks through. By 2024, only faint traces of cloud remain. Together, the ten circles form a diagonal line that crosses through the central "1" of the composition, symbolically invalidating the dollar's face value. What cost $1 in 1925 costs roughly $18 today, a loss of approximately 96% in purchasing power. PAC makes that century of erosion visible through geometry alone, without a single number, axis, or legend on the face of the work. Limited signed edition of 7